“By social standards, I’m still trash, and I know that,” says Audra, the 41-year-old mother of 15-year-old Grace, one of three teenage mothers depicted in “baby/girls,” which premiered in March at the SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas, and screened recently in Little Rock. “I just keep trying to tell Grace, ‘This is not the life you want.’”
This self-portrait captures one of the themes of the 94-minute, Arkansas-based documentary, currently making the rounds at film festivals across the country: failure, or at least the perception of it. Teen parenthood as social, moral and economic failure, which — though the genders share responsibility for its physical cause — seems otherwise to fall entirely on the girls.
Each girl — Grace, 16-year-old Olivia and 17-year-old Ariana, followed by filmmakers over a two-year period — is acutely aware of how the outside world views her, with disdain colored by pity, and, though she might struggle not to, seems to adopt that outlook, at least partially, about herself. Grace says if she could go back to who she was before becoming pregnant, she’d tell that girl, “You’re stupid, you need to fix yourself.” At the time, though, she’d see teen moms on TikTok who “would just look so happy, and I wanted to feel that.
Although their own models of parenthood were largely absent or discontented, each girl entertains an opposite fantasy: that her own motherhood would be antithetical to what she’d seen. Her life could be her mother’s redemption story, and by parenting a child entirely differently, she could both break the cycle and somehow reparent herself.
“Don’t let your child see you broken all the time,” Ariana says. “Be the mom that you wanted to grow up with.”
While outside judgment feeds the girls’ sadness and self-doubt, it also fuels their determination to break generational cycles of teen parenthood, poverty, abuse and addiction. All grew up without a father and spent long periods of time without their mothers, who, as teen moms themselves, were far from ready for the responsibility and coped by turning to drugs. All were raised, to some extent, by grandmothers taking up the family torch of parenting grandchildren while their own children were incapable.
The food and shelter these grandmothers provided were, at times, the only consistent advantages the girls and their siblings had over living with their parents. Olivia, one of five children who lost their mother to suicide when Olivia was about 8, says, “When we (get) to my mom’s grave on her birthday or when she died, we’ll smoke a blunt with my grandma and leave it on her stone.”
She adds that this is “very bad to say, because you shouldn’t be smoking or drinking with your grandma.”
Like the other two girls, Olivia spent time at Compassion House, a Springdale maternity home “for pregnant and parenting teens ages 11-17,” according to its website. Like them, she was court-ordered to go there, at the beginning of her pregnancy and for different reasons: because her grandmother’s house “wasn’t a good environment for me to be in.”
Despite this, after eight months and with the birth of her child looming, the 16-year-old clearly missed and loved the woman who raised her. “I still want to go home and have family Christmas with my grandma,” she says. “I would do anything to go home with my child and be with family.”
Ariana was court-ordered to Compassion House as well, but after she gave birth, and for truancy. After having her son, Matteo, she “missed a lot of school,” she says, and her grades went from 3.0 to “1-point-something.”
“Next thing you know, I’m in court, and they wanted me to contribute, instead of ‘being such an actual burden,’” she says, emphasizing the final word bitterly. “They used the word ‘burden’ on my family.”
Ariana says the judge gave her one month to get “a job, a house, a car and my driver’s license” — new baby notwithstanding — or “I would get shipped off to Compassion House.”
“It very much felt like the state was trying to punish me for being a teenage mom,” she says.
Ariana’s mom, Robin, who became pregnant at 17 and “let (my) mom raise” Ariana until the two developed a relationship later on, also expresses a deep aversion to the prospect of her daughter ending up with a life similar to her own.
“I was mad,” she says, describing her reaction to Ariana’s pregnancy. “I wanted her to do better.
“If I had held off and not had (my kids), I probably would have a whole lot more than I do now and I wouldn’t be living with my mom,” Robin adds.
The girls’ moms’ desire for their daughters to escape what they clearly deem the worst possible fate — the outcome of their own lives — is as intense as the daughters’ desire, once resigned to giving birth, to prove they can do the same thing totally differently. All three girls find this is much easier wished than accomplished, in a world where the odds and others’ expectations are stacked against them.
Ariana, the one subject still involved with her baby’s father after giving birth and who, outwardly at least, appeared the most stable, lived in a trailer in Newport with the supportive-seeming Brian, a factory worker, and their son, following her release from Compassion House.
The couple paid “seven or eight bills,” just from his paycheck, she says, which was gone as quickly as it came. The 18-month waitlist for “every single daycare” had so far prevented her from getting a job to help out. “It’s a lot harder,” she says, “especially when you can’t really afford to be a stay-at-home mom.
“People who are poor don’t have that luxury.”
Both she and her partner have lists of things they “would have done differently,” had they known how hard it would be to adequately support a family. Both put waiting to have a child at the top of their lists, even though “I love him to death,” Brian says.
Later in the film, pregnant with their second child, Ariana is stressed about how they will manage financially with another child who, if she’s going to work, will also need daycare.
Ariana says when she told Brian about the pregnancy, he “just broke down, and he says, ‘Look, it’s going to take me a while to warm up to this.’”
She wants to get a better job, “but you can’t just walk in and get a job that actually pays good. It requires a GED or a diploma, and some even a college degree.”
“I should have just finished school,” Ariana concludes. “I had one more year left. I really should have just finished.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing, but ever since I was 14, I always said I wanted a child so I could give it the love I never got,” Olivia says.
A fate that “baby/girls” suggests is made more likely in Arkansas not only by unchecked poverty and trauma, but also by sharply limited reproductive options and a sex education curriculum in public schools that is inadequate at best and nonexistent at worst.
The documentary’s website includes some dismal statistics highlighting these points: Arkansas’ teen birth rate is, for example, neck and neck with Mississippi’s for the nation’s highest, at nearly double the national average. Just 3% of the state’s school districts offer highly comprehensive sex education, another data point from a 2025 study by Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families shows. Grace admits she “never had a sex ed class” in school. “I was on birth control, but it was the pill,” she says. “I’m not good at taking pills.”
Another teenage resident at Compassion House “learned sex ed whenever I was already seven months pregnant. It was kind of funny,” she says, smiling ruefully while holding a newborn.
Olivia says she “didn’t know how you got pregnant,” and lacked knowledge of basic female anatomy: “I just found out we have three holes,” she says. “I thought we peed and everything out of one hole.”
Crystal, a Compassion House employee who, like some others, became a mother as a teenager, says, “I can’t preach this to the girls, because we are a pro-life organization, but I truly believe, personally