Anyone who thinks TikTok is just a place for young people to learn trendy dance routines or how to bake a microwave cake hasn’t discovered its community of teen mothers. The hashtag “teen mom” has more than 11 billion views on TikTok — and over 10 million of those views belong to upstate New Yorker Brooke Morton.
Morton created her TikTok account after giving birth to her daughter, Aloura Lavender, in March of 2021 — just a few months shy of her 15th birthday. Most of her videos score a couple of hundred thousand views, but some, like the one titled “this is my teenage pregnancy story” — in which she admits that her pregnancy was not planned — earned 10.5 million.
“As I got pregnant, I knew. I knew I was going to keep my daughter,” she said in the post.
“My pregnancy was not taken very lightly,” she added. “It was really hard for me and for everyone else.” Morton is not the first person in her family to become a teen parent; her own mother and father were also teenagers when they had kids, as she revealed on her first-ever YouTube video.
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According to her TikTok, Morton no longer attends school in person, but takes online classes so she can stay home with Aloura. She says she lives with her baby’s father, 17-year-old Jason Vaughn and Vaughn’s father in the upstate New York town of Cornwallville. And while parenting is their main priority, she and Vaughn did steal a night away from their daughter to go to prom in June. Morton’s prom post on Instagram shows a carousel of three images: herself posing alone a white gown, posing with Vaughn, and the both of them posing with Aloura in a lush yard.
Neither Morton nor Vaughn responded to The Post’s request for comment.
Morton and Vaughan, who have nearly two million followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, have become part of a larger community of teenage parents supporting each other — and even appearing on each others’ platforms — across social media.
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Cadyn Potvin, who gave birth during her junior year in high school in 2021, has almost 5,000 followers on Instagram and 60,000 on TikTok and also makes frequent appearances on Morton’s social accounts. Sarah Homrich, a 19-year-old mother of two with 900,000 followers on TikTok and 26,000 on Instagram, does not know Morton personally, but they follow each other’s accounts.
Some teens appear envious of moms like Morton. One of her followers, Olivia Claire, commented on her YouTube video from June saying, “brooke, i’m so proud of uuu !! we’re the same age and honestly, ur living my dream of wanting to be a mom hehe. i’ve wanted to be one since i was 2 years old ahh but you and your lil fam are the cutest! you got this girl!”
Another Morton fan @Kaylee_cutajar commented on Instagram, “So cuteee❤️❤️ your so responsible i look up to you 😍 i watch your vids everyday 😍”
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Morton’s social media accounts tend to make teen-mom life seem easy. Her hair is always perfectly highlighted, her make up always intact, and little Aloura never seems to cry. Viewers only witness happy moments: Aloura giggling, Morton and Vaughan sharing a kiss, the family of three doing a little dance. None of the videos or images reveal the difficulties a young family usually endures, although Morton has posted that she was “scared” and “felt judged” for most of her pregnancy.
Dr. Meghan Downey, a New York-based licensed clinical psychologist who works with teenagers and young adults, said this is a key reason why content like Morton’s should be consumed with both caution and compassion.
“I hope we can strive for the balance of not glamorizing teen pregnancy and at the same time supporting those who suffer the consequences,” Downey said. “Teen mothers have higher rates of depression and postpartum depression compared with mothers over 25. Teenage mothers are also more likely to experience PTSD than other teenage women.”
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The teen-parent TikTok trend comes at a time when teen pregnancies are actually declining in the US — down 5.7% between 2008 and 2012, according to a 2014 study. Despite worries that shows like MTV’s “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” would glamorize — and even encourage — teen parenthood, pregnancies for girls between 15 and 19 have continued to plummet, down to 15.4 births for every 1,000 in 2020.
Two years after becoming pregnant, Morton appears to have no regrets. In a July 2021 YouTube video, Morton summed up her experience, saying, “I don’t really have any complaints, aside from my back hurting when I’m carrying her all the time.”
