Reflections on rurality stigma associated with teen-fatherhood

There is stereotypical thinking in communities when coming to parenthood. Most community members believe that only mothers are capable of caring for the child. Most community members see teen fathers as unresponsible community members who indulge into different drugs. This stereotypical thinking mainly occurs in rural areas wherein grandparents will deny the biological father rights to care for the child. Due to the rejection and other social ills that come to place, some fathers find substances as an escape route or coping mechanism. This paper is aimed at identifying and mapping available literature on rurality stigma associated with teen fatherhood and substance use. The researcher adopted scoping review as the research design and purposively sampled articles from different database such as ScienceDirect, Ebscohost and Google Scholar. Data was then analyzed thematically.