Leah Messer on the Impact of Teen Mom, 14 Years Later

The reality star opens up to Teen Vogue about growing up on television, generational trauma, and raising her own teenagers.

By Fortesa LatifiPhotography by Madeleine Hordinski

June 22, 2023

The first time Leah Messer was on television, in 16 and Pregnant, she was 17 and expecting twins. Simultaneously, she was mourning her high school life and trying to build a new one with Corey, the father of her children. Her blonde hair was highlighted and scrunched, except for her straightened bangs, and her bright blue eyes were lined in thick black pencil. She spoke with a southern drawl typical of West Virginia.

In Messer's episode of 16 and Pregnant — the MTV hit show that lasted for six seasons and spurred spin-offs like Teen Mom, which are still airing 14 years later — Messer was alternately morose, fixated on her former life and tempted to try to return to it, and bubbly, even laughing when an attempt to buy a used car was derailed by her peeing her pants. Six minutes into the episode, her cheerful veneer dropped when she said to her friends, “I really wanna try to make it work with me and Corey. I didn’t have my dad at all and I don’t want my kids to go without that.”

Leah Messer, now 31, was born to a teenage mother who was born to a teenage mother. Leah's grandmother was 18 when her mother, Dawn, was born. By the time Dawn was 16, she was pregnant with Leah and married to Leah’s father, a 25-year-old Baptist preacher and construction worker. The Messers had three children in quick succession, but by the time Leah was in kindergarten, the marriage had ended. Within a year, Dawn got remarried, to a man she met through their work as hospital janitors.

In Leah's memoir, she describes her mother as angry and abusive throughout her childhood, quick to spank her children or dole out antiquarian punishments, like making them hold heavy boots until they cried. The Messer children spent their childhood years bouncing from trailers to low-income apartments, she writes, isolated from extended family after yet another fight about their mother’s parenting.

A photo printed in her memoir features an adolescent Leah looking at the camera, wearing a shirt that reads “Cheer America,” her eyes blank, her mouth drawn. She didn’t attend school for the entirety of eighth grade, an arrangement her mother approved of because it enabled Leah to help around the house.

At age 13, Leah had sex for the first time, with an 18-year-old, the same night she had her first kiss, she reveals in the memoir. When she told her mother, Leah writes, Dawn put her on the Depo birth control shot, “[without a] discussion about whether, at 13 years old, I was ready to be having sex.”

The reality of Leah’s upbringing reads like an Appalachian American nightmare, threaded with drugs, physical abuse, intergenerational poverty, and teenage parenthood. When asked whether she feels resentful toward her mother, Leah says she used to: She used to be angry and resentful, but now she just feels bad for her. “I feel sorry that she endured so much,” Leah explains, referring to Dawn’s own difficult upbringing, teenage pregnancy and marriage. “Now I feel like I just want to nurture my mom too.”

As she talks about her childhood, it’s clear Leah sees her mother as another victim in a line of victims, a young woman who was thrust into motherhood and marriage as a teenager, who wasn’t prepared for the struggles to come, and had to grow into adulthood while raising her own children. Leah doesn’t see her mother as a villain at all; she sees her as a generational casualty. “Please put in there that I love my mama,” Leah says at one point.

Despite Leah’s tumultuous childhood and being raised in a state with one of the nation's highest rates of teen parents and people living in poverty, teenage parenthood was never part of her plan. Instead, she dreamed of college and leaving her small town. She dreamed of possibilities. But those were left behind when she found out she was pregnant. In one 16 and Pregnant scene, Leah went through a box of childhood mementos as she packed to move in with Corey, finding a goal her grade-school self had written out in wobbly handwriting: “Hi, my name is Leah, and I am nine years old,” she read aloud. “Five years from now, I will be trying to get a scholarship to go to college. I want to be a doctor when I grow up.” Leah's blue eyes clouded over, and for a moment you could see the hope she had for a different life.

Leah Messer wears a Nanushka dress Larroude heels Jennifer Fisher earrings and a Alighieri bracelet.nbsp

Leah Messer on 'Teen Mom' Generational Trauma and Raising Her Own Teenagers

When Leah gave birth at age 17, her mother was just 34 and her grandmother was 51, she recalls. As Leah sees it, no one was surprised. “It was normal,” she says, pointing to the repeated generational patterns. “That was the life for many women before me. This was what was expected.”

When Teen Mom 2 began to air, Leah’s story stood in sharp contrast to other stars on the show. Not only was she struggling with an on-and-off relationship with the father of her children, she was dealing with her daughter’s medical complexity. Onscreen, Leah watched her twin daughters, Ali and Aleeah, develop differently, with Ali, who was later diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, struggling to reach developmental milestones.

As Ali cycled through doctor visits that came to characterize her early life, Leah and Corey got back together, vowed to stop arguing and put their daughters first. The first season passed in a fever dream of appointments — including a particularly heartbreaking scene in which Ali needed to be sedated for an MRI and Corey and Leah collapsed crying into each other’s arms — and a hyper-speed progression of adult milestones.

As other young women on the show muddled through teenage relationships, Leah moved back in with Corey, got engaged, worried whether Ali would ever walk, and ended the season married at 18. “[At that age] I was thinking that’s the only way I was complete or that my family was complete,” Leah explains. “I wanted to give my kids the mom, the dad, the all-American dream.”

The marriage lasted six months, ending when Corey found out Leah had cheated on him with her high school boyfriend Robbie a week before their wedding. Robbie had already been a point of contention on Leah's 16 & Pregnant episode: Leah smiled giddily around Robbie, then turned dour with Corey, and Corey was suspicious that Leah still loved her former beau.

Before she got pregnant, Leah lived a certain kind of high school dream — she was the cheerleader dating the football player. When everything changed, she seemed unable to let that dream go, wondering aloud if she was meant to be with Robbie despite having children with Corey. After Leah's cheating with Robbie led to divorce from Corey, fans wondered what it was about Robbie that kept her coming back, jeopardizing her relationship and family with Corey.

Leah remembers how strong the lure of first love and lost youth were in the face of being a wife and mother. When she catches clips from old episodes, she says, she finds herself saying, “What were you thinking? But at the same time I’m like, ‘You’re so young.’”

In any case, Leah's marriage to Corey was over. Just a year after the divorce was finalized, though, 19-year-old Leah got married again, to pipeline engineer Jeremy Calvert. Leah smiled onscreen, still in braces on her rainy wedding day, as she and Jeremy each held one of her daughters. Rewatching it now, I’m struck by the uneasy symmetry of her life laid over her mother’s — the succession of young marriages in a misguided but understandable search for a provider for the children. Of her first marriage at 18 and her second marriage at 19, which also ended in divorce, Leah says, “No one seemed shocked, except for my family attorney. That is really what I thought was normal and what I thought was my destiny.”

Two months before Leah's 21st birthday, after what she says was a spinal-cord puncture during an epidural and C-section to deliver her third daughter, Adalynn Faith, Leah was sent home from the hospital with prescriptions for three different opioid painkillers. It was 2013 and she was in pain in West Virginia, the epicenter of the opioid epidemic, and a state that would later reach a $400 million settlement with two drug distributors after alleging they had “recklessly oversupplied West Virginia with prescription pain medication,” as reported by Reuters.

With her pipe-fitter husband often working away from home for weeks at a time, Leah tried to take care of her three young children as she fell deeper into drug addiction — and it was all unfolding on reality television. The Teen Mom 2 footage from that time is harrowing: Leah appeared to fall asleep during a phone call about Ali’s muscular dystrophy diagnosis, fought with her husband and ex-husband in a voice made raspy by opioid use, and nodded off while holding her newborn niece.

Did the cameras ever stop rolling? No, Leah can’t remember a time when they did. Does she think MTV took advantage of her, filming an obviously high young mother as she struggled to take care of her children? “Yes,” she answers. “You can see me high. Cut the cameras. You can see me falling asleep or whatever. Cut the cameras and immediately do an intervention…. instead of using it for the benefit of TV and drama.”

In a statement, a Teen Mom 2 producer says the production crew followed the “principles of documentary filmmaking — we document, we don’t intervene.” Still, both Leah and MTV confirm, it was a Teen Mom producer who eventually pushed Leah to go to rehab after watching footage of her driving that he found concerning. “It’s bittersweet, because I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the help I had without [MTV],” Leah says. “So I thank them. Then it’s also like, damn, something could have been done differently, without a shadow of a doubt.”

When Teen Mom 2 originally aired, viewers were split on Leah: Was she a cheater who didn’t know how to treat Corey? Did she deserve both of her divorces? Or was she a young woman doing her best, a mom just trying to make it through each day of raising three children while facing the realities of her own childhood trauma and Ali’s doctor saying the child would eventually lose muscle strength and respiratory function?

Even now, the show's fans argue in comment sections and forums dedicated to the franchise: Was Leah an unfit mother who put her daughters in unsafe situations while addicted to drugs or another casualty of the American opioid epidemic who was lucky to make it out alive? Is she a product of her environment, doomed to repeat the mistakes of the women before her, or the first in a new chain, guiding her daughters toward something better? Has Leah really changed or did she just learn how to do her makeup and hide the darker parts of her life from MTV’s prying cameras?

Leah has been on TV for nearly 14 years now, long enough to grow out of her own teenage years and for her daughters to grow into theirs. Her southern drawl has softened. She has been married and divorced twice (and engaged a third time, though the couple have since split up). Her daughters have become their own people. She beams while talking about the twins, now 13, Ali’s horseback riding, Aleeah’s cheerleading, and 10-year-old Adalynn’s acting.

Leah's smile doesn’t falter when she reflects on how she didn’t have time to find what she loved in her own rushed childhood. I get the sense that she’s okay with everything she missed out on, as long as her girls don’t miss out too. This is what she wants for her children: the chance to explore their identities in a childhood that is not rushed or shortened.

If Leah could go back to her younger self, she would tell that version of her to enjoy school and just be a teenager. If she could, she would teach teenage Leah sex education. But of course, she can’t go back. She can teach her daughters, though, and says she has regular safe-sex talks with them. “No shame or guilt," Leah adds, “just open conversation. When asked a question by them, I answer honestly.”

Children born to teen mothers are more likely to become teen parents themselves (see: Leah, her mother, and her grandmother), but Leah doesn’t think her daughters will repeat the pattern. “It’s the little things, like booking their first gynecologist appointments together next year and having these open conversations with them… that I think will be enough to break the cycle,” she says. “I love them no matter what their journey may be, but I do want more for them and I always will.”

Leah hasn’t known a life without MTV’s cameras since she was 17, and each of her three daughters have been on television since they were born. She worries about the effects growing up on TV may have on her daughters, but she’s frank about the fact that the show is her income as a single mother of three. She has spent her entire adult life on television (when she initially signed on for 16 and Pregnant, she says, her mother had to give consent because she was underage) and doesn’t know what it would look like without the show.

When I ask where she sees herself in 10 years, she says with a laugh, “I don’t know. I try not to think too far in the future. I would love to do more things with the camera, even if I’m not the one being filmed. I like sharing stories…. and I definitely will have my real estate license in the bag.”

Leah is 31 now, three years away from the age when her own mother became a grandmother. Her oldest daughters are 13, four years away from the age she was when she had them. Her children are growing and she is growing alongside them, flourishing in ways her own childhood didn’t allow. “It’s a sweet spot for us right now,” she says. “I’m 31, but I feel younger than I ever have. I genuinely believe my life is just beginning. That’s how it feels — it’s just beginning.”