Teen Pregnancy

Teen Pregnancy

Risk factors that predict adolescent fatherhood include social, familial, and personal characteristics such as gang membership, high antisocial behavior, and chronic drug use, as well as poor education, low self-esteem, large family size, and limited financial resources.[24] Early fatherhood is linked to having adolescent mothers themselves.[25] One longitudinal study found that nearly all male children of adolescent mothers became sexually active early; one third were fathers by age 19.[26] This is similar to research on daughters of teenage mothers, who, as found in one study, are 66% more likely to become teenage mothers themselves, after accounting for other risks.[27]Intergenerational cycles of teen pregnancy may be accompanied by other risk factors due to teen parent’s access to resources and education about parenting and providing for children. Many teens lack access to preventive care before they become pregnant and prenatal care once they are pregnant. Teen mothers are more likely to drop out of school and face unemployment, poverty, welfare dependency, and other negative outcomes than women who delay childbearing.[28] These circumstances may lead to a higher probability of abuse and neglect on their children.

One study based on an Illinois state database linking births to records of incidents of abuse/neglect or foster care placement found:

“Young teen mothers were 2.2 times more likely (3.12 percent vs. 1.44 percent) to have a child placed in foster care during the first five years after a birth compared to women who had a first birth at age 20-21.

They were also twice as likely to have a reported case of abuse or neglect as women who had a first birth at age 20-21— almost one in ten children of young teen mothers were reported for abuse or neglect, compared to one in 20 for children of mothers aged 20-21.

After controlling for a number of other risk factors that also affect these outcomes, delaying a birth from age 17 or earlier to age 20-21 would lower the foster care placement rate for these women’s children by a third, while instances of abuse and neglect would fall by almost 40 percent.”[29]

Demographically speaking, while the overall teen birth rate has decreased significantly since 1990, in 2008, the birth rate among Hispanic, non-Hispanic black, and American Indian or Alaska Native teen girls age 15-19 was more than twice the birth rate among non-Hispanic white teen girls age 15-19.[30]

The risks of teen pregnancy on children’s development, as well as the cultural and family influences on adolescent parents, is a lens CASAs can use to focus their developmental perspective to understand the factors that impact teens as they raise their children.

<<Back to Page 11 Page 12 Continue to Page 13>>