As Concern Grows Over the Fate of Teen-Age Moms and Their Kids, Researchers Are Looking at What Affects Their Success or Failure : Loss of Innocence

Maria Pulido lost her childhood at the age of 12.

All the innocence of youth vanished when she began having sex with her 20-year-old boyfriend and became pregnant. At a time when some little girls may still be playing with dolls, Maria was buying maternity clothes.

Today, Maria, who’s name has been changed to protect her privacy, is 14. The boyfriend is long gone and she is the mother of a 21-month-old toddler. She is among the 90% of adolescent mothers in the United States who reject adoption and abortion and raise their babies, despite evidence that their children have a higher risk of living in poverty and developing behavioral and learning problems.

The ramifications may be staggering, warns psychiatrist Irene Goldenberg, who specializes in child behavior at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital.

“We see developing a population (of teen-age mothers and their children) who have the cards stacked against them from the beginning. They are setting themselves up for failure, and it’s costing society enormous amounts of money.”

Because of mounting uneasiness over the fate of children born to teen-agers, a unique study is under way in Orange County to track the mental and physical development of children such as Maria’s. It may be the most comprehensive research project attempted in its field.

Led by Costa Mesa psychologist Bonnie Simon, researchers from UC Irvine Medical Center and the state Developmental Research Institutes hope to learn how to predict developmental problems in these babies and to prevent them from becoming social and economic outcasts.

A 1990 national study found that of the 500,000 babies born to teen-age girls in one year, 30,000 were born to girls under 15. In Orange County alone, 4,743 girls ages 10 to 19 delivered babies in 1990; 73 of them were 14 and under. A UC San Francisco study concluded that families begun by teen-agers in California during 1985 will cost $717.6 million in food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Medi-Cal payments over the next 20 years, according to the Coalition for Children, Adolescents and Parents in Orange County. National statistics from 1988 indicate that more than half of families on AFDC began with a teen-ager giving birth.

Simon, whose dedication has led her to assist in more than 30 births by youngsters in the study, stresses the concern is not just one of tax dollars.

“Our ultimate goal is to let people (teen-age mothers and their children) lead richer and fuller lives,” Simon says.

Simon’s project at UCI may be the first to track girls from the time they are pregnant to the time their children enter elementary school. About 75% will be Latinas and their babies, who, Simon says, have been underrepresented in previous studies of teen-age mothers. Because California’s population is increasingly Latino, the study could provide new perspectives on children raised in that culture, Simon says.

The family support system is particularly strong in the Latino community, evidence suggests. Young Latinas often have a family that provides nurturing and affectionate support, perhaps resulting in better outcomes for their youngsters, Simon says. Research shows that some adolescent mothers care for their children quite well, she says.

Maria, who lives at home with her parents and receives Medi-Cal, admits that without her parents’ financial support, raising her son would be much more difficult. Many children of teen-agers are being raised with help from grandmothers and other family members. That can be good or bad, depending on the quality of care.

The four-year project, budgeted at $150,000 a year, is funded by the state. Simon is also seeking a federal grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, D.C. The project intends to track 300 pregnant teen-agers and their children; about 100 girls are already enrolled.

Researchers have begun evaluating the girls’ personalities, emotional stability, self-discipline, intelligence and health. They will also examine family and sexual histories. Babies are given physical and mental tests.

Researchers are particularly interested in finding physical indicators of a mother’s emotional stress, which “may have dire effects on the unborn infant,” says Simon. Stress is known to reduce oxygen to the fetus and to “bathe the fetal brain in an excess of growth-retarding neurochemicals, which are capable of causing brain damage.”

Previous studies estimate that 10% of children of very young mothers will be diagnosed as mentally retarded, about triple the projection for the total population. More than half will repeat a grade before reaching high school.

This may be because the mothers typically have little education and do not make it a high priority for their children. A pilot project completed this spring by Simon and doctors at UCI found that if pregnant teen-agers received adequate prenatal care and strong, loving support from family and friends, their babies developed well physically and mentally during the first year.

“But the change comes sometime after a year,” says Simon. “Something happens between the child’s second and fifth year of life. There tends to be generally a slip in development.”

Pregnant girls ages 12 to 16 were enrolled in the pilot study through UCI Medical Center, the Orange Unified School District’s teen-age mother program and St. Ann’s maternity home in Los Angeles.

Teen-age mothers tend to come from low-income, single-parent families and are likely to be minorities, says Kristin Moore of Child Trends, a Washington, D.C., research organization. They usually do poorly in school, have low self-esteem and often lack parental supervision, communication and affection.

Because these girls often see nothing bright in their futures, they see nothing wrong with having children early, says Cheri Hayes, executive director of the National Commission on Children.

Some believe the problem goes deeper than the lack of self-esteem and education. Gayle Wilson Nathanson, executive director of the Youth and Family Center, a Los Angeles agency that counsels teen-agers, says the violent deaths of teen-agers in some communities may have an enormous effect.

“Because we see some adolescents who feel they are old if they get to 19 . . . there’s a lot of pressure on them to grow up fast,” Nathanson says.

“For some of these young girls, getting pregnant has become a rite of passage. Everyone is doing it. It’s like wearing the right pair of jeans,” she says. “Even for teen-age boys, fathering a child is seen as socially fine.”

Preventing such pregnancies takes more than just birth control education, she says. With such casual attitudes toward sex and pregnancy, these girls must be “motivated and given the sense there is something at the end of the line for them in life.”