Going Back to School With Teen-Age Moms
When a pregnant teen-ager marries, she is less likely to return to school than if she remained single and became an unwed mother. However, whether they marry or not, black teen-age mothers are more likely than whites to continue their educations.
These are among the findings from the National Survey of Family Growth and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute in Seattle under contract to the federal Office of Population Affairs. Both studies were conducted over several years and involved thousands of young women.
Long-Term Consequences
A great deal of research has found that giving birth in adolescence has long-term life consequences. These mothers (and their children) have greater-than-average health problems, lower educational attainment and earnings throughout life, a higher incidence of receiving welfare, a greater likelihood than other families of child abuse and neglect, and higher divorce rates.
Attention has been paid mainly to the effects on a family’s future of the mother’s age at first birth and marriage. This analysis of the data, published in the professional journal Family Planning Perspectives, looked at the results of the sequence of birth and marriage during adolescence: comparing the futures of young women who married after they became pregnant; those who gave birth without marrying, an increasing pattern; and those who followed the traditional pattern of marrying and then conceiving a child.
The researchers found different futures in terms of education, marital stability and births of more children between teen mothers who married and those who did not and also that these futures varied by race.
Returning to School
Among white teen-agers, about 20% of those who had babies out of wedlock were enrolled in school six months after childbirth. A much higher proportion--more than half--of black teen mothers who did not marry returned to school after giving birth.
Marriage had a dramatic adverse effect on future education for both groups, particularly the black teens, perhaps because these young women took on spousal as well as parental roles at a young age, whereas the girls who didn’t marry were more likely to continue living with their families which provided an arrangement much more conducive to being a student. Only 11.3% of the pregnant white teens who married re-enrolled in school after childbirth and 14.9% of the black teens--only a fourth as many as the number of single black teen mothers who went back to school. (All of the figures regarding education were adjusted for variables such as the teens’ parents’ educational attainments, the teen-agers’ age and school status when they became pregnant and other factors that affect educational plans.)
The researchers wondered whether teen girls who had high expectations about education when they became pregnant would plan to continue to pursue their goals. It appears that adolescent women are not hardheaded about love and marriage. A significant finding was that there seemed to be no relationship between the young women’s personal ambitions and whether they delayed getting married. Those who had ambitious educational plans when they became pregnant did not tend to put off marriage more than others, even though remaining with their parents would have made it easier for many of them to stick with their educational goals.
No Significant Difference
The conventional wisdom is that teen-agers who marry because they are pregnant have a poorer prospect for a lasting marriage than those who marry first and conceive later, but the researchers found no significant difference in the durations of the marriages of these two groups.
Lasting Marriages
The group that had the poorest prospect for lasting marriages among both races were the women who had their babies out of wedlock. Looking at longer-term marital success, among white women who became mothers as teen-agers, about one-fourth of them experienced a marital disruption after 10 years of marriage compared with more than three-quarters of the teen mothers who delayed marriage until after giving birth.
The researchers speculated that single women with children may be “less able to compete successfully in the marriage market and, thus may accept less appropriate partners.” Also, as the child is not the husband’s in these families, marital problems may result.
The study also looked at whether decisions about marriage affected how quickly teen mothers had subsequent children, considered important because of the economic and health effects on the family of short intervals between births. The teen mothers who married were found to be more likely to have a second child sooner than those who gave birth out of wedlock, although in the long term, several years after having their first child, there was no difference in the birth rates between women who married early or later.
