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"I wouldn't say a word that could be reckoned as injurious,
But to find a mother younger than her son is very curious."

When you subtract the age (or apparent age) of a child from that of their parent (mother or father, despite the trope name), this results.

Often done to justify a Mrs. Robinson or Stacy's Mom, but sometimes, the mother in question really was that young when she gave birth. Sometimes she only appears this way because of the art style.

In Real Life, a girl can conceive about two weeks before her first menstrual cycle, which commonly occurs (on average) at around 11 or 12 years old these days (although carrying a child to term before physical maturity is risky and has a higher chance of Death by Childbirth; Henry VII's mother was thirteen when she gave birth to him and couldn't get pregnant again because of the damage to her reproductive organs) and in rare cases this can occur at an even younger age, such as five years old.note 

See also:

Subtrope of Hollywood Old. Compare and contrast Absurdly Elderly Mother, where a mother conceives a child at a post-menopausal age.

noreallife


Examples:

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Faked parentage

    Anime and Manga 
  • Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: At one point when the Principal and homeroom teacher come for a visit in the Ryouzanpaku dojo, Miu forces Sakaki and Shigure to pose as her parents. While Sakaki does look within the age range despite being in his early thirties, the Principal quickly notes that Shigure looks way too young to be Miu's mother (she's 20-21 at the start of the story, and Miu is 16), on top of neither of them having any physical resemblance to her.

    Fan Fiction 
  • RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: In a non-cannon fic, a pony called Midnight claims she is the sister of a foal called Thesis, who was brought to life via magical mishap. Thesis is too young and naive to notice the logical inconsistencies, even when she considers Trixie and Twilight her mothers. The other foals of Ponyville, meanwhile, do catch on to some of the inconsistencies there, but since Thesis knows how she was created, this just convinces the kids their parents were lying about the whole "stork" business.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Tracy Jordan's adult son on 30 Rock is far too old. In an aversion, Tracy sees through the deception immediately (while his friends assume the Cloudcuckoolander was actually taken in).
  • Discussed in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "T.R.A.C.K.S", when Agents Coulson and Simmons are posing as father/daughter family. Simmons comments that Coulson is "far too young to have a daughter my age." (Though it would seem she's just being polite: the official website states that Coulson was 49 and Simmons 26 at the time the mission took place, meaning that they could easily be father and daughter at their respective ages.)
  • Good Luck Charlie: One episode has Gabe trick his elderly teacher into believing that his teenaged siblings PJ and Teddy (in thinly veiled disguises) are his parents. It almost works.
  • In the Only Fools and Horses "And the Unlucky Winner Is...", Del wins a family holiday for the Trotters by entering a children's art contest with a picture painted by Rodney when he was 14. In order for them to be eligible to claim the prize, Rodney (who's in his early 20s) has to pose as a 14-year-old boy, with Del (who was 16-17 when Rodney was born) pretending to be his father. Del at least has the sense to claim Cassandra, about the same age as Rodney, as a stepmother.
  • In the Our Miss Brooks episode "The Wrong Mrs. Boynton", Miss Brooks unwittingly offers to masquerade as Mr. Boynton's mother. This is in spite of the fact she is actually a couple of years younger than her Love Interest. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • In Rome, Niobe gives birth and successfully (for a while) passes it off as her daughter's child- her daughter is thirteen. (Romans often had children that young).

    Western Animation 
  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender season 3, Sokka and Katara fake being Aang's parents at a Fire Nation school. The two of them are barely older than he is and wear unconvincing disguises (Sokka wore a fake beard, Katara wore a pillow stuffed under her shirt to make her look pregnant) to pass themselves off. To really blow some heads, just remember that in terms of pure chronological age, he could be their great-great-grandfather, and somehow, Aang could pass himself off as a Miniature Senior Citizen when entering Omashu.


Writers Cannot Do Math

    Anime and Manga 
  • Cardcaptor Sakura: It is never stated how old Syaoran's mother Yelan is, only that she looks very young and beautiful enough to stand out in a universe populated by The Beautiful Elite. She is, however, thought to be somewhere in her mid-to-late 30s, and possibly married as a teenager. This is never confirmed because she is only seen in the first movie.
  • Justified in Dragon Ball Super: Broly, where Bulma intends to use the dragon balls to make herself five years younger and Goku guesses she's probably done this a few times before.

    Comic Books 
  • Kill Killer features a story with a "Dirty Callahan"-like killer of pedophiles who, after a lengthy period in prison for beating the supposed killer of his five-year-old child, reunites with his partner, the mother of the child... a 19-year-old teenager. Someone obviously couldn't make a subtraction... Or maybe that was the point.
  • The "30 Years Later" arc in the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) has Sonic and Sally become parents, although they still look like their teenage selves. Shadow doesn't count since he's immortal, but how the HELL does the now 45-year-old Sonic still look 15?!

    Fan Fiction 
  • In The Future Briefing Island Midnight is Momo's mother. This caused several issues that were pointed by some readers explaination, which the author amended by making Midnight a couple years older than her canon age and stating that she only had Momo a year after graduating from UA.

    Film 
  • The Count of Monte Cristo (2002): Dagmara Domińczyk was twenty six at the film's release. Henry Cavill, who played Albert, the son of her character Mercedes, was nineteen. Meanwhile, Jim Caviezel, who as Dantes turns out to be Albert's true father, was thirty four, which is slightly better. Justified in all cases due to the time frame involved, and the needs of the actors to play their younger selves.
  • Sorceress: Robert Ballesteros plays antagonist Traigon both when his daughters are newborn infants and then two decades later, after they're aged up. Both the actresses (twins Lynette and Leigh Harris) are only two years younger, which is glaringly obvious in the film. This might be due to his magic keeping him young: that's not shown though.
  • Tales of an Ancient Empire: Janelle Marra, who plays Rajan, was 31 at the time, only seven years more than Inbar Lavi, playing her daughter Alana. Even worse, Michael Pare plays Oda, father of Aedan, played by Kevin Sorbo, who was born less than a month before him. They look about the same age as their onscreen kids, given this.

    Literature 
  • Harry Potter:
  • In W.E.B. Griffin's OSS series, one of the major characters is the son of a Hollywood star, who, if one believes her official studio biography, gave birth to him at thirteen. However, this is entirely due to the studio claiming that she's younger than she actually is due to the fact that she always plays The Ingenue, and they need to make her look as if she's young enough to plausibly play that role (They try not to draw attention to the fact that she has an adult son - who is only legitimate because she married the father for one year to avoid any possible scandal connected to the pregnancy - whenever possible).
    • In fact, they did everything they could to cover up or erase the evidence, and the mother ends up believing her own "official" bio. When he confronts her, she not only flatly denies that he's her son, but that she could possibly have a son in the first place.
  • In Jane Yolen's Arthurian novel Sword of the Rightful King, it says early on that Gawaine is only four years younger than Arthur (which actually fits well with the early legends). However, a little later Merlinnus reminisces that Gawaine's mother/Arthur's secret half-sister, Morgause, was seven when her mother was pregnant with Arthur. Since the story never implies that Morgause gave birth at 11, this was probably a mistake.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In One Life to Live, Greg is explicitly stated (in courtroom testimony, no less) to have ten years' experience as a fully licensed practicing neurosurgeon, putting him in his early 40s at the youngest. His mother is played by an actress in her late 40s, and to make things interesting he has a 15-year-old sister. All the characters were introduced during 2009 so SORAS isn't involved.
  • In the third episode of Girl Meets World, Topanga tells a small child that she's 30. Topanga and Cory have a daughter, Riley, in 7th grade. If Riley is the normal age for her grade (12-13), Topanga had her when she was 17-18. Given that Boy Meets World goes through Topanga's second year of college and she had no children up until that time, clearly someone didn't do the math. That or she was simply lying about her age.
  • According to That's So Raven, Chelsea was born in 1989. That makes her 28 at the start of Raven's Home. She has a 4th-grade son and her similarly aged friend Raven has 6th grade twins. Either Raven's Home takes place 20 Minutes into the Future, Writers Cannot Do Math, or the two had kids really young.
  • On Charmed (1998):
    • One episode shows a family tree of the Warren clan, which is a mess of continuity and logic errors. Among them is that Grams would have been 13 when Patty was born. Her age was later retconned to being twenty when Patty was born. Ironically their actresses Jennifer Rhodes and Finola Hughes are actually thirteen years apart in age - although this could be justified by Patty dying in the 70s while Penny only died right before the series began, so Jennifer Rhodes would be playing her across various years in the girls' life.
    • A rare case with a father. The first actor cast in the role of Victor Bennett, Anthony Denison, got recast after only one episode precisely because he looked far too young. According to Holly Marie Combs, a note from the studio was that he looked more like a slightly older love interest than a father.
  • Pearl Forrester on Mystery Science Theater 3000 is played by an actress who is actually two years younger than the actor playing her adult son Clayton. In fact, she actually raised him to adulthood twice due to him being turned into a baby at the end of season 7. Even following the Time Skip, she appears no more than middle aged. Needless to say, the mantra is in full effect here.
  • Stargirl (2020): Given that Hina Khan is only 32, that would mean Anaya was possibly underage when she had Isaac, whose actor looks like he's in his early twenties.
  • Dark Desire: Maite Perroni, who plays Alma, was born only fifteen years before Regina Pavón, who portrays Alma's daughter Zoe. Consequently, she looks more like her older sister. There's also no indication that Alma had Zoe as a teenager.
  • Parodied in The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. The episode "The Suite Life Goes Hollywood" has a potential sitcom being made about the characters, and Carey is aghast when the actress cast to play her (the mother of eleven-year-olds!) is only twenty-two.

    Video Games 
  • Dead or Alive: Ayame, the mother of Hayate, Kasumi, and Ayane. She's had three kids, Hayate being in his early twenties and Kasumi and Ayane being in their late teens (17 and 16, respectively, in the original game), and in her every appearance so far, she doesn't appear to be much older than Kasumi.
  • In The Sims 3, Boyd and Susan Wainwright are 11 days until Elder while playing in normal lifespan (AKA they're 62 SimDays old), while their daughter, Blair, is in her very first day of Young Adult (31 SimDays old), meaning that Blair was born while both her parents were in their very first day of Young Adult, and thus she would have been conceived when her parents were teens in "normal gameplay". In the meanwhile (a completely different family/household but still in Sunset Valley) Leighton Sekemoto is 19 days until Adult (basically middle-aged) while his son, Sam, is on his first day of toddler. This is because, while 1 SimDay = 1 Year in the Child, Young Adult, Adult, and Elder Stage, it equals 6 months in the Baby, Toddler, and Teen life stage.
    • The Sims 2 has a few as well; Brandi Broke of Pleasantview is 22 days away from elderhood and Andrew Martin of Riverblossom Hills is 27 days away from elderhood, and both have teenage sons. This would indicate that they were teen parents, but this, of course, is impossible in-game and their memories clearly show them as becoming parents after reaching adulthood.
  • Super Mario Bros.: Not the case anymore; but the Koopalings were once considered to be Bowser's children along with Junior. Bowser himself is only a few years older than Mario (who is 24), and the Koopalings are all teenagers or young adults. If they're considered Bowser's children; Bowser would only be about ten years older than Ludwig (the eldest).
  • Due to poor translation rather than poor math, an NPC in Mega Man Battle Network says that ten-year-old Lan's grandfather, the famous Dr. Tadashi Hikari, is forty-five years old. Yikes. Later games in the series clarify that Tadashi died at forty-five (of a genetic heart problem) before Lan was born.
  • Professor Oak is around 47 in Pokémon Red and Blue. He already has a grandson that is around 11 and a granddaughter that is several years older than that. This means that both Oak and his son had kids in their teens, which is not likely what Game Freak intended.
  • Most of the playable characters in Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors are in their prime age, even those with adult children. The most egregious is probably the Cao family. Cao Cao, the patriarch, is stated to 34, while his son Cao Pi is 27. Cao Pi himself has a son, Cao Rui, who serves as an NPC. This means that Cao Cao was 7 when he had Cao Pi, and Cao Pi himself must still be a child when he had Cao Rui.

    Web Comics 
  • All the main heroines in How I Became Yours.
    • Katara would have become a mother at age 15 had Mai not induced a miscarriage, and in the epilogue (taking place when she's 23), she has several children who look to be at least 5 years old.
    • Toph would have been 21 at the time of the epilogue, and she also has seemingly kindergarten-aged kids.
    • Azula, since she got pregnant during the comic, would have been 17/18 when her child was born.

    Western Animation 
  • On Gravity Falls, the Whole Episode Flashback shows a baby that is probably meant to be Dipper and Mabel's grandfather, Shermie (whom we never see as an adult). "More than ten years" pass before Stan meets Ford again, then another thirty years before the main events of the show. So at this point, Shermie would be a little more than forty years old, but with twelve-year-old grandkids? Even if you assume that "more than ten years" is closer to twenty, that's cutting things pretty close.
    • Gets Lampshaded in Gravity Falls: Lost Legends, where Shmebulock's String Theory includes the possibility of Blendin's Time Travel being involved.
    • Granted, this is all based on the assumption that the baby is Shermie. A common fan explanation is that Shermie is actually older than his brothers and the baby was Shermie's child (presumably the twins' father).


Combination/Actually That Young/Other

    Anime and Manga 
  • In the original version of Digimon Tamers, Ruki/Rika's age was 10, and her mother Rumiko was 28, meaning she was 18 when she had her. In the dub, Rika's age was increased to 12, which, assuming her mother's age wasn't changed, would make Rumiko 16 when she had her. Rumiko's own mother Seiko is 49, meaning she was 21 when she had Rumiko and in her late 30s when she became a grandmother.
  • This is often the case for most of the parents in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, who are usually married and/or have children by the time they're in their very early 20s. One of the few exceptions would be Holly Kujo née Joestar, who had Jotaro at the reasonable age of 28. Her paternal grandmother, Lisa Lisa, had her son when she was around 32.
  • Diva from Blood+ looks, sounds and even acts very youthful, if not childish and immature. She becomes this after she rapes and kills Riku., who happens to be 13 years old. She does mature slightly a year after the Time Skip.
  • In Sword Art Online, Kirito and Asuna adopt the AI Yui as their daughter. At the time, Kirito and Asuna are 16 and 17, respectively. Yui, by virtue of being an AI, is like an 8-year-old despite in fact being 2.
  • Konata's mother Kanata from Lucky Star looked incredibly young throughout her life and (sometimes) acted accordingly. This fact gave fuel for some interesting speculation about the preferences of Konata's father Soujirou.
  • Tomo-chan Is a Girl! gives us Carol's mother Ferris. An extra chapter shows Carol's father Eddie proposing to Ferris, who says she can't get married because she's 13; Eddie freaks out because he thought she was older than him due to her working as a waitressnote  and being ridiculously overdeveloped for her age. And then after Ferris accepted the proposal, she mentioned "the little one inside me", triggering a Heroic BSoD in poor Eddie.
  • Masamune-kun's Revenge: The title character's mother, Kinue Makabe, looks, acts, and dresses like she's about 9-or-so years old... despite being 42 with two teenage kids.
  • Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms: Maquia is from a tribe where Immortality Begins at Twenty with fifteen years old being the aging-stopping age. Adopting a normal human baby at age fifteen technically makes her a Supernaturally Young Parent, but she is also passing as a normal human and her son's biological mother, causing many to mistake her for having had him quite early in life.
  • The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Hakari's mother, Hahari, gave birth at age 13, via artificial insemination because her lover was about to die from an illness.
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba has Kagaya, head of the Demon Slayer Corps. He is 23 at the start of the story, and his eldest child is 9, so he was 14 when he became a father. It's revealed that the members of his family are suffering from a curse due to Muzan Kibutsuji being related to them, resulting in all of them dying before the age of 30, so Kagaya has to have children young in order to raise a successor. His wife also counts, having been 17 when their eldest daughters were born.
  • Julia Murai of Great Teacher Onizuka had Kunio when she was 13, and was subsequently disowned by her parents. She somehow managed to get a job, an apartment, and raise a baby as a teenager in Tokyo, one of the most expensive cities in the world. By the time of the series, she's 27, and most of Kunio's male classmates (and his teacher) regard her as a Stacy's Mom. This naturally is a sour spot for Kunio. The Live-Action Adaptation age lifted her to 34, having had Kunio at 17.
  • Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs: Despite her looks, Chisaki's mother Hiyori is 36, meaning that she had Chisaki (who is 15-16) at either age 20 or 21.
  • A side-story in Princess Princess revolved around Akira's family from Family Complex. Tohru and Yuujirou meet his family, who are all ridiculously good-looking, and begin to guess what Akira's relation is with each of them. The first person they meet is actually the mother, who is a petite woman that barely looks to be old enough to have four children, with two of them already of college age. The same holds true for his father, who easily gets mistaken for Akira's older brother.
  • Yo-kai Watch: Lily Adams is supposedly in her thirties. She has the loose flowing hair and facial cast of a college student, and in the show is only about six inches taller than Nate, who is ten years old.
  • YuYu Hakusho: Yusuke's mother is only 28, with Yusuke explicitly stating she gave birth to him when she was only 14 (she was 15 in the manga at the time).
  • A Bride's Story: Due to the customs of the region and period, this is played straight by Karluk’s sister, Seleke, who has four children, the eldest being eight (that said, the middle two, Torkcan and Chalg, seem to be twins). When Karluk and Amir visit his uncle’s place, one of the women has at least two children (a toddler and a baby) at the age of eighteen. Indeed most mothers in the story seem to have their first child in their late teens.

    Comic Books 
  • A variation: in Fantastic Four, for years, Ben had made casual references to his Aunt Petunia, who had clearly at least helped raise him and who was always understood to be really, really old. When writer/artist John Byrne finally introduced her, she turned out to be young and pretty — not just enough to subvert Ben's stories (the implication being that he was joking), but enough to seem borderline implausible for someone who'd raised him. Since then, we've learned that Ben's uncle did indeed marry a much younger woman than himself, but more to the point, when she showed up at Ben and Alicia's wedding recently, she was portrayed considerably older-looking and said half-jokingly that she'd seriously let herself go in recent years.

    Fan Works 
  • Past Sins
    • Twilight adopts the magically generated Nyx. Biologically, they're a late teennote  and child respectively, and that's not even going into the newly-made or millennium-old question with Nyx. And things get even weirder when Nyx is artificially aged up to an adult horse...
    • There's also the fact that some of Twilight's blood was used in the ritual to resurrect Nightmare Moon (due to her status as the Element of Magic), possibly making her a Truly Single Parent or with some influence from Princess Luna.
  • Aki-chan's Life is a particularly extreme example, with fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Asuka and Shinji being parents of a four-year-old girl. Time travel was involved.
    • Of course, even in the previous story, Asuka was probably only about fifteen or sixteen when she gave birth to Aki. Even that's just a guess on her and Shinji's part as they weren't bothering to keep track of time after the apocalypse.
  • The Child of Love: Asuka gave birth to Teri when she and Shinji were fifteen. During her birthday she admits she is too young to be a mother.
  • Ghosts of Evangelion: Kyoko is only a few years older than her daughter because she was a bodiless soul for twenty years.
  • In RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse, Ditzy Doo was just barely legal when she got pregnant with Dinky.
  • Bait and Switch: When Yui returns from EVA-01 (actually Shinji in his mother's body), she's only twenty-four due to not having aged after spending a decade without a body.
  • The Differentverse: Twilight hatched her adoptive son Spike when she was eleven. She's 21 in the present day.
  • Oversaturated World: While Ditzy Doo presumably gave birth to Dinky at a more normal age, she subsequently decided to send Dinky back in time to spend time with her teenage self, ending up in this trope.
  • This is a plot point in Red Jewel Diaries when Fate tells Lindy that a DNA test said that her biological father is Clyde. Lindy instantly points out that it's impossible since Clyde was only 10 when Alicia (the girl Fate was cloned from) was born. When Fate does some investigating, she finds out that her father was actually an aged up clone of Clyde who was (at most) three years old.
  • Black Sky: Dorea Black gets herself married after her fifteenth birthday and immediately gets pregnant with twins. Her husband also is an example since he was only sixteen when she conceived, and almost six years spent in cold storage ensured he stayed sixteen while the kids are now five years old, which logically would mean he fathered them at eleven, almost twelve years old.
  • Child of the Storm:
    • Lily and James Potter, with the author calculating that Lily would have got pregnant at 19 and a half. Of course, the case is a touch odder here, since James was Thor in mortal form (and entirely unaware of it), meaning that he was technically 1500 when Harry was conceived.
    • Minerva McGonagall was no more than 20 when she got pregnant with Clint's mother, by Bucky Barnes.
    • The Carter-Danvers-O'Neill family has the high end of this (i.e. children being born between 19-21 years old) in several generations, with the author admitting that he didn't realize until too late that he was trying to fit too many generations into too short a time-span for more standard gaps. In particular, Jack O'Neill is the second child of Alison Carter, Peggy Carter's little sister (actually, her daughter by Steve Rogers), who was born in 1945, is a Brigadier General and has an adult daughter, Sharon Carter, who's a qualified SHIELD Agent when the story starts in late 2006. This means that he was born 1966 at the very latest, when his mother was 21, implying that she was at most 20 when her first child, Marie, was born, and that he was about 20 or so when Sharon was born - a nod is given to this when it's mentioned that Sharon was 'something of a surprise to her parents' in how early she arrived.
  • Dragonstone features a wedding between Jon Stark and Margaery Tyrell, both being thirteen years old only - the agreement was that they would wed after Margaery's first period, and she's older than Jon. She gives birth to their firstborn son Duncan when she's only fourteen.
  • In Arcadia or Bust, Claire is mistakenly thought of being NotEnrique's teen mom by Bill Miller as he is threatening her.
  • In Married to the Koopa King, Bowser has eight kids and several are preteens but he's not even thirty. He was married at fifteen to a slightly older girl and began having kids right away.
  • Zinnia in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, while her age isn't explicitly stated, is heavily implied to be somewhere in her mid-teens, and her daughter Aster is already a toddler. In this case, it's justified, as a later side story reveals she was raped.
  • Warm Milk and Galaxies parodies the famous The Empire Strikes Back scene where Vader is revealed as Luke's father, crossing over with My Hero Academia, where All for One as The Emperor reveals to Izuku as Luke that Shigaraki as Darth Vader was his father. Shigaraki seems to be in his mid-20s, while Izuku's 15. It turns out to be All Just a Dream of Izuku's, and his real father gets a kick out of it when Izuku tells him.
  • Steal the Truth, Reach Out For Your Heart: In the years since Persona 4, Yukiko has become a mother of two young kids with a third on the way by the time she’s 26. Her firstborn child, Tsuneo, is 6 years old, meaning she gave birth when she was 20, which Word of God confirms.
  • In Safe Anchorage, Jeyne gives birth to her Child by Rape at 13.
  • In Freedom's Limits, Madavi and Smador are indicated to be only around fourteen or fifteen years old when their eldest child is born. This is justified, as being quite young and unworldly (including not realizing female humans have some biological differences from female Orcs) pregnancy never actually crossed their minds when they began having a sexual relationship.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • May December: Gracie and Joe's first child was born when she was thirty-six and he was thirteen (and he is, in fact, the same age as Gracie's son from her previous marriage); as a result, Joe looks more and acts like his children's older brother than their father. While in his late thirties in the present day, a time that Elizabeth notes is when most people are just starting to consider having kids, he has a college-aged daughter and two twins who are about to graduate high school.
  • Tommy Boy: Tommy's new stepmom Beverly (Bo Derek) looks very young for someone who has an adult son (Paul, Rob Lowe). It later turns out that they aren't actually a mother and son, but a pair of married con artists who scammed Tommy's father.

    Literature 
  • Acid Row:
    • Melanie Patterson isn't even twenty yet, already has two children and is six months pregnant with her third child. She had her first child, Rosie, when she was only fourteen.
    • Gaynor Patterson is indicated to be unusually young for a grandmother; both her youngest son and her eldest granddaughter are four-years-old (her son is actually younger than her granddaughter by a few months). Gaynor's eldest daughter was in her early teens when she first got pregnant and it's implied Gaynor herself started having children when she was quite young.
  • A Brother's Price justifies this trope by changing the definition of "mother". All sisters of a child's birth mother who are still part of the same family groupnote  are her mothers. This makes possible a situation in which someone's mother is the same age as her, or possibly even younger.
  • Seems to be pretty heavily implied as the norm in Allegiant, given that Natalie and Andrew were together before they entered Abnegation together, and that the Bureau requires that all persons entering the experiment promise to have a minimum number of children to ensure the survival of their "corrected genes".
  • In Die Alchimistin, Sylvette gives birth at eight. It isn't clear whether it was fully natural or the Big Bad stimulated her puberty somehow (he was probably able to do that).
  • In Alice, Girl from the Future the Pirate Queen first appears as a strikingly beautiful woman in her twenties. She is also the mother of Rat who is definitely much older than that, which is lampshaded by the hero. Then her young face turns out to be a mask, and what lies beneath is so horrid that the author doesn't even describe it.
  • The medieval fantasy world of The Hero Took Everything from Me, So I Partied with the Hero’s Mother! is one where giving birth at the age of 15 is not unusual, though it is also a world where few people live past the age of 50 as well.
  • In Magic or Madness, all magic-user parents were absurdly young when they had their kids because magic is Cast From Life Span (and if you don't use it, you go insane). This causes several problems, since said mothers weren't mature enough to properly raise children.
  • Played for Drama in We Can't Rewind: Denise is indicated to have given birth at eleven. Later, due to a "Freaky Friday" Flip, her daughter Jaymee also manages to give birth at age ten, albeit from her mother's adult body.
  • In the Colleen McCullough novel The Touch, heroine Elizabeth gives birth to her daughters Nell and Anna at 16 and 17, respectively. When Anna is raped and impregnated at 13, she becomes an example of this too and makes Elizabeth an absurdly youthful grandmother.
  • In The Giver, Jonas mentions that "birthmothers", like everyone else, have their profession chosen for them at the age of twelve, and that they start having babies not long after that.
  • In the Earth's Children series, Ayla gives birth to her son, Durc, when she is eleven years old. It's worth noting that this is normal among the Clan, since they mature faster than the Others. However, since Ayla is one of the Others, having a baby at such a young age puts a considerable strain on her and she nearly suffers Death by Childbirth. Jondalar later tells her that most women of the Others are at least in their early teens when they give birth for the first time, which is still considered too young by some people. note 
  • Eleanor & Park: Eleanor’s mother Sabrina is somewhere in her thirties, which is awfully young to be a parent to a teenager and four other children. A conversation between her and Eleanor’s stepfather imply that she got pregnant with her daughter when she was in high school, making it a Teen Pregnancy.
  • In the young adult novel Mama Had A Little Store, the protagonist, who is about 12 years old, comments on how young a classmate's mother looks. The classmate, who lives in poverty and whose community is discriminated against for their race, replies, "She twenty-five."
  • Meg Langslow Mysteries: In "No Nest for the Wicket," Merg looks up some photos of Mayor Pain George Pruitt’s ancestors and observes a picture of one woman glaring at her husband shortly after the birth of their fourteenth child (she went on to have three more). She notes that the woman would have been too young to babysit by modern standards when she had her first child. Possibly subverted with the later reveal that the picture and accompanying news stories are fakes made to prank the Pruitts, and it isn't even clear if that couple existed.
  • In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Sissy gets married right after she turns fourteen and has a stillbirth on her fifteenth birthday.
  • While My Pretty One Sleeps: When Neeve talks to a woman who was recently fired from one of Gordon Steuber's sweatshops, she's shocked when the woman mentions her daughter also worked for Steuber, as Neeve thinks the woman looks no older than her late twenties. The woman says her daughter is only fourteen, implying she wasn't very old herself when she got pregnant. Neeve is particularly disgusted that Gordon would exploit such vulnerable people.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Doctor Who: In "The Doctor Dances", the Doctor discovers that Nancy, who claims to be Jamie's sister and looks young enough to match, is actually his mother, having gotten pregnant when she was 16.
  • Boardwalk Empire: Jimmy Darmody's first scene in the pilot with Gillian plays as if he's meeting his mistress (an assumption many characters make) as they appear roughly the same age and she is very affectionate with him. We later discover Gillian was sexually assaulted at age 12, resulting in Jimmy's conception. It also explains her general lack of boundaries, both with her son and many other men.
  • In Waco, Michelle was twelve when Koresh had a 'vision' that she would be his second wife. She is fourteen at the time of the series, with a toddler named Serenity.
  • In Shameless, Ethel has a Child by Rape from her 65 year old husband Clyde at the age of 13.
  • In iCarly (2021), Freddie has a ten-year-old stepdaughter named Millicent. Millicent's mother Gwen seems to be around the same age as Freddie (mid-late twenties), which would make Millicent a product of a Teen Pregnancy.
  • The Crowded Room: Emmy Rossum played Candy Sullivan, Danny's mother, when he's both a little boy and young adult. Tom Holland plays Danny, who's nine years younger than her. It's somewhat justified as it turns out she had Danny while just seventeen.
  • Friends: Ross' season six girlfriend Elizabeth is a 20 year old college student. When the gang meet her father, who's played by Bruce Willis, the girls comment on how surprisingly young he is. He explains that he and his late wife were very young when they had Elizabeth. note 

    Music 
  • Gender flipped in the folk song He's Young But He's Daily Growing. A woman whose age is "twice twelve" complains of her arranged marriage to a much younger boy. The last verse of the song usually begins, "At the age of fourteen he was a married man; at the age of fifteen the father of my son..." In one version the boy was married at twelve and a father at thirteen.

    Radio 
  • In an episode of In Our Time looking at Oedipus Rex, one guest says that it's a mistake for Jocasta to be played by an older actress because "she cannot be more than about 52. Oedipus is about 38 or 40. [...] So Oedipus turns up at 20, this brilliant young buck, and gets off with this incredibly sexy woman, who's around 31." She doesn't really elaborate on this.

    Myths & Religion 

    Theater 
  • In Romeo and Juliet, Lady Capulet offhandedly mentions that she was the same age as her daughter when she gave birth to Juliet (thirteen), implying that she's only 26- to 28-years-old at the very least. However, at one point, Lord Capulet implies they had other children who died. Juliet may have been the youngest of several offspring, all the rest deceased.
    • Given how much blood is shed due to the feud, it's not hard to believe that several Capulet siblings were killed by Montagues before the action of the play began.
  • In Next to Normal, Diana and Dan both claim that, when their son was born, they were each "a child, raising a child". During a flashback, it's revealed that Dan was 21 when Diana got pregnant, but it's never actually stated how old Diana is.
  • In Elisabeth, Archduchess Sophie takes charge of her oldest granddaughter from her mother Elisabeth, claiming that it was because a child couldn't raise a child. In real life, Sisi gave birth at the age of 17, ten months after her wedding. Her other children (Gisela and Rudolf) were born when she was 19 and 21, and was also whisked away by Sophie senior for the same reason. The musical featured what amounted to a custody battle, which Sisi won at the end of act 1.

    Video Games 
  • Harvest December:
    • Masaki finds out that his girlfriend Yuki Towada's parents are both 34, and realizes that since Yuki is 17 that means her parents were the same age when she was born.
    • In August, a mystic ceremony causes both Yuki and the goddess Shiro to become pregnant with Masaki's children. Shirou gives birth in December that year, while Yuki gives birth during her and Masaki's graduation.
  • In HuniePop, Jessie is 36, but has a daughter (Tiffany) who is 20. Jessie makes no secret of the fact that she got pregnant at 16, and in fact, this is why she dropped out of high school and went to work in the adult entertainment industry.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War leans hard on the medieval ethos of when people were considered adults who could start their own family. This is most obvious with Ethlyn, the protagonist's younger sister, who is eighteen when the game begins and has recently given birth to her first child with the husband she is Happily Married to. By the time the first generation ends she is twenty and has a newborn son.
  • Supplementary material for Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia reveals that King Lima IV became king of Zofia at a fairly young age, and the given timeline means that he was at most in his early/mid-thirties at the time of his death. Hidden data in the game also gives his two surviving children's ages as 21 and 17. This means that Lima couldn't have been much more than 12-13 at the time of Conrad's conception if one is incredibly generous with the description of "young." Considering Lima was a notorious womanizer and implied Royal Brat, it's unclear if the writers actually meant for him to be that young of a father or if they simply didn't realize the implications.
  • In The Last of Us, Joel tells Ellie that he didn't go to college because he already had his daughter. That means he wouldn't have been older than about 18 when she was born. Sarah was twelve when she died in the prologue, which means his birthday the day before she died would have probably been his 28th, 29th, or 30th.
  • In Yakuza 6, Haruka Sawamura, adopted daughter to the main playable character Kiryu Kazuma, is revealed to have given birth to a newborn son, Haruto, while Kiryu spent three years in prison, as a result, he goes out on a wild goose chase to find the father for a majority of the game's plot.
  • In Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair, Rihatsu Shinpuku was born on March 10, 1975, while her daughter Raiko was born on August 14, 1996, making Rihatsu less than 21 years old when she got pregnant with Raiko. Raiko's older sister, Reiko, was born on November 5, 1992, meaning that Rihatsu gave birth to her at 17.
  • The Sims games starting from 2 allow you to invoke this by using age-defying items such as The Elixir of Life and The Age Freeze Potion, allowing a sim to stay youthful even as their children age and grow up. From 3 on, it's possible to manipulate the lifespan of each life stage, so that a sim could become this.
    • The Create-A-Sim mostly averts this; In 2, adults can only be made siblings or spouses to other adults, never parents, and the same applies to elders. Similarly in 3', adults can only be siblings, spouses or romantic partners to other adults or young adults. In both 3 and 4, however, a young adult can be parent to a teenager, and 4 also allows an adult to be parent to a young adult, potentially creating this situation.
  • Discussed and lampshaded in The Walking Dead: Season Two. In the "Go with Jane" ending, a man who needs Clem's and Jane's help, will ask Clem if the baby she's holding is hers. He quickly corrects himself, seeing how Clem is only 11. AJ, the baby, was the son of two adult survivors from Clem's old group, who she is now taking care of.
  • Trials of Mana mentions that Angela looks very much like her mother, True Queen Valda. Said queen looks barely older than her daughter.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: Arven looks like he’s in his mid-to-late teens, but his parents, Sada and Turo, look like their in their early-to-mid twenties. It turns out that the Sada or Turo (depending on the version) that the player has been following is actually an AI replica that they created, and the real Sada/Turo died long ago during a lab accident, explaining why they look so youthful.

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • In Ace Attorney according to an AI, Vera Misham, who was 19 as of the present-day portion of Turnabout Succession, is the mother of a five-year-old son in Case #6.
  • Kittisaurus: When Dr Kim examines Nana (then referred to as the mother cat), he remarks that she is barely two years old technically making her a teenager when she gave birth to her sons. Fortunately, when her kittens are old enough, Claire has her spayed so this won't happen again.

    Western Animation 
  • In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Singing" Mrs. Jötunheim states that she just turned 28 and is the mother of Hector who is in middle school, which is around 11 or 12. This implies that Hector was conceived when she was 16 or 17.
  • Exaggerated in Drawn Together, Foxxy Love, despite being 20, has a teenage grandson. Of course, since it's established that cartoons don't age and since she is from the 70s, it could be a justified situation. Another episode showed that babies can get pregnant, so it's still plausible.
  • Family Guy: In "To Love and Die in Dixie", after Meg tells her friends that Chris is going to be killed, a five year old girl tells Meg that she has a daughter of her own who would most likely grow up to admire Meg.
  • The Jetsons has the 33-year-old Jane Jetson being mother to the 15-year-old Judy Jetson. While it seems like a case of Writers Cannot Do Math at first, the show was made in 1962 and at the time, it was common to marry at a young age, so Jane may very well have been intended to have been a teenage bride and mother. Either that or The Jetsons' universe runs on different calendar.
  • The Captain Planet episode “101 Mutations” is about puppy mills. Linka says that one of the dogs looks too young to be a mother. The sad fact is that puppy mill dogs are usually bred when they’re still puppies themselves.
  • In South Park, Kenny is actually the middle child in his family (despite him being resurrected all the time): he has an older brother named Kevin and a younger sister named Karen. While his dad Stuart looks around the same age as the other South Park dads (40s-50s), Carol looks like she’s in her 30s AT MOST. Kenny is now ten years old, so it’s likely that Kevin was a teen pregnancy.
  • The Simpsons shows that Kearney has at least one kid. While we’re not sure exactly how old Kearney is, in one episode he says he’s both “a teenager and the parent of a teenager”. If this were true, he would have had to conceive his first child at six years old, since he would have to be 19 and his eldest kid 13 for this to make sense. Squick indeed.

Alternative Title(s): Absurdly Youthful Father, Absurdly Youthful Parent, Absurdly Youthful Parents

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