In my last newsletter, “Sixteen and Pregnant,” I explained some of the challenges faced by teen moms with their health, economic status, educational attainment, and employment opportunities. Unfortunately, the children may suffer even greater consequences than their mothers.
Here’s a roundup of potential consequences to the children of teen moms, according to Youth.gov, culled from CDC data. These children are more likely to:
- have a higher risk for low birth weight and infant mortality
- have lower levels of emotional support and cognitive stimulation
- have fewer skills and be less prepared to learn when they enter kindergarten
- have behavioral problems and chronic medical conditions
- rely more heavily on publicly funded health care
- have higher rates of foster care placement
- be incarcerated at some time during adolescence
- have lower school achievement and drop out of high school
- give birth as a teen
- be unemployed or underemployed as a young adult
These are a lot of challenges to overcome! And while adolescent girls have some control over the choices that result in bearing a child, however blurred by hormonal or societal influences, the children born to them do not.
It goes without saying that if a teenager faces economic challenges because she becomes a mom too soon, her child will too. The entire household suffers from lack of educational attainment and employment opportunities. Pregnant teens face unique problems during pregnancy and beyond because of their age, but their children face their own unique challenges.
Perhaps the most shocking statistic is that the sons of teen moms are almost three times more likely to be incarcerated than boys/men whose mothers were adults when they gave birth. According to a fact sheet published by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, there is a distinct correlation between adolescent childbearing and male offspring incarceration rates.
Factors that lead to a young man’s incarceration are complicated, of course, and any of the above adverse effects may play a part in this outcome. According to the National Library of Medicine, the variety of consequences for a child who had an adolescent mother can be subdivided into physical health, cognitive, behavioral and emotional effects.
Children of teen moms suffer different health risks from their moms, including being born prematurely, low birth weight, and increased infant mortality. If mom smoked or drank alcohol excessively during pregnancy, they’re more likely to suffer a variety of ills like low birth weight or fetal alcohol syndrome. However, even mild health effects can snowball into more serious emotional, cognitive, or behavioral problems.
A National Library of Medicine study in 2009 on the well-being of the six-year-old children of teen moms concludes that they have higher BMI, lower mean scores on cognitive measures, and smaller head circumference, which may result in developmental delays or motor skill problems. The differences were significant between children of teen and adult moms.
Another National Library of Medicine publication demonstrates that children of teen moms are more likely to repeat grades and have lower academic achievement in school. More alarming, the same study showed an increased risk among these children of having a fatal accident before age one. This risk is exacerbated when the mother is Black or if the mother’s educational attainment is low.
A 2017 study demonstrated lower IQ levels among offspring of younger mothers. While scores did improve over time, improvement was related to the stability of the mother and the household in which they lived. Parenting education and support is important in bolstering both the mother’s stability and the child’s cognitive abilities. Multiple interventions have been suggested for mothers and their children, all of which were offered by the academic campus where I taught.
Programs like the one I worked with, common in the last half of the twentieth century but now almost extinct, offered social service counseling as well as childcare instruction and mentoring. We provided programs for fathers and families of the children and participated in library story hours and Parents as Teachers programs to help moms develop healthy parenting skills.
Many of my students told me that their mothers had also been teenagers when they were born, which confirms the prediction that daughters of teen moms are also more likely to become pregnant in adolescence. Rather than seeing this as unfortunate, my students seemed pleased to be repeating their mothers’ experiences.
“I’m so glad I’m having my children young,” several girls told me. “I’ll be my baby’s best friend.” They seemed to fear being perceived as stodgy or dull by their children, quite likely their perceptions of their much older teachers … like me.
Most appeared to have close relationships with their mothers, many of whom were younger than my own children. The girls depended on their moms for both emotional and financial support. Perhaps having a child at such a young age seemed the best way to replicate that relationship with a child of their own.
Sometimes I simply detected a girl’s yearning to have someone in her life who was completely devoted to her. Someone who loved her no matter what. Someone unlike the boy who declared he loved her, fathered her child, and then forgot her.
Janice Airhart 