Set in a Maison Maternelle, Jeunes Mères follows four interwoven stories of pregnant adolescents and very young mothers—Vanessa, Perla, Ariane, and Julie—balancing attachment, abandonment, and precarious responsibility. Eschewing cathartic payoffs, the Dardennes’ handheld realism traces everyday acts of solidarity and strain within cramped institutional spaces, where love, volatility, and structural pressures (absent fathers, addiction, poverty) collide. The result is an unsentimental, ethically attentive portrait of adolescent motherhood as ongoing labor rather than melodrama.