Teen Births Statistics for US Consumption

7 Comments

1. 

   santiago on December 31, 2010 at 1:22 pm

   Interesting story, but it’s kind of put out there without any explicit context or argument around it, so that makes it kind hard to make any judgments at all that aren’t based on prejudice or some belief about things in the back of one’s mind.  

   Is a lower teen birth rate a good social objective at all, or doesn’t it matter, and why?  (The more sophisticated studies of teen births indicate that, for the mother at least, giving birth as a teen has no real impact on life outcomes by the time she is in her late 20’s.)  Or is improving the socio-economic conditions which explain higher incidences of teen pregnancy, birth or not, the real data point we should be looking at?

   Also, it is hard to draw any such conclusions from making comparison’s between the US and other high income countries because, for one thing, no other country has a more racially and culturally diverse population, particularly of more fertile immigrant populations, than the US, so you have to really control for those things before making an honest comparison regarding birth control education and availability. It could be that more teens in the US just want to have children than in other wealthy countries because of different socio – cultural values, which would imply that changes in people’s values is where we would want to look.

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     on January 1, 2011 at 11:58 pm

     I’d say that the context is simple: Teenage birth is pretty much a disaster for the mother, and there really are no two opinions about that.  Your statement about “giving birth as a teen has no real impact on life outcomes by the time she is in her late 20’s” is really beyond belief clueless.  If you are going to drop this kind of drivel, you need to put in the study.  There are all kinds of studies out there, but I have never ever seen any that say that teenage birth is irrelevent.

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       canberra boy on January 2, 2011 at 9:51 am

       This is a really interesting and complex question.  I have to say that initially I was inclined to support your view that teenage birth leads to poor outcomes for the mother and the child(ren).  But santiago’s comment made me wonder about why teenage girls become pregnant.

       Australia has a relatively high teenage birth rate by developed country standards – 16 births per 1000 teenage girls/women in 2007.  A little research turned up some interesting papers on the subject.

       My original views are neatly summarised in the opening quote from a paper written by Ann Evans (Australian National University) for a 2007 conference:

       In 1968 Campbell stated that:

       The girl who has an illegitimate child at the age of 16 suddenly has 90% of her life’s script written for her. She will probably drop out of school…, not be able to find a steady job…; she may feel impelled to marry someone she might not have otherwise chosen. Her life choices are few, and most of them are bad (1968: 238).

       These negative consequences reported by Campbell continue to be found in many crosssectional studies in the US, Europe and the UK (for discussion see Berthoud and Robson 2001; SEU 1999; Luker 1996; Furstenberg 1987).

       However, with advances in statistical modelling methods and the availability of longitudinal data, often of large scale and at the national level, researchers in the US and UK have been able to control for the difference in young mothers’ backgrounds. All of these studies have led to significant improvement in the methodology for studying teenage motherhood and
       pave the way for continued efforts in this area. On balance their results suggest that there are negative consequences associated with teenage motherhood, but these are much smaller than previously thought and can be moderated through social and personal support. Once we control for the selection effects of teenage motherhood it is suggested that teenage motherhood is a consequence, not just a cause, of social disadvantage.

       So this suggests that perhaps it is socially disadvantaged girls who are more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, and that their life prospects were not great anyway.

       Then, on the question of the outcomes for their children, an article called Teenage Children of Teenage Mothers: Psychological, Behavioural and Health Outcomes from an Australian Prospective Longitudinal Study from the journal Social Science and Medicine (Vol 62 No 10 – Jan 2006).  This study examined the associations of maternal age with offspring psychological, behavioural and health characteristics when the offspring – the teenage children of teenage mothers – were aged 14 years.  In part, the abstract says:

       Results show that the 14 year old offspring of mothers who were aged 18 years and younger compared to those who were offspring of older mothers were more likely to have disturbed psychological behaviour, poorer school performance, poorer reading ability, were more likely to have been in contact with the criminal justice system and were more likely to smoke regularly and to consume alcohol. However, maternal age was not associated with health outcomes in their offspring at age 14 years. Indicators of low socioeconomic position and maternal depression were also associated with poorer psychological, cognitive and behavioural outcomes among 14 year olds. In addition children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds and whose mothers were depressed were more likely to have self- reported poor health, asthma, to have been admitted to hospital twice or more since birth and to be bed-wetters at age 14. The associations between maternal age and psychological distress, school performance, and smoking and alcohol use were all largely explained by socioeconomic factors, maternal depression, family structure and maternal smoking. These findings confirm that not all teenage mothers and their offspring have adverse outcomes, and that many if not the majority have good outcomes.

       Hmmmn.  I’m still going to advise my recently-turned-teenage daughter not to get pregnant too soon.

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         on January 2, 2011 at 11:28 am

         It’s really not all that complicated (and I am a statistician who knows a lot about longitudinal research, and who is working with others right now on a grant about teen pregnancy prevention methods): Given two girls of identical backgrounds, the one that gets pregnant unmarried at 16 will have huge lifetime disadvantages.

         And another thing: HUGE proportions of the problems in schools are due to teen unmarried mothers.  HUGE.  You cannot help a child with homework if you are the sole provider, do the laundry, make dinner, and also have a social life.  If you have 2 kids as an unmarried person, it’s a total disaster.  

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           santiago on January 4, 2011 at 10:05 am

           Here’s the key paper that has changed thinking on this subject. Unlike previous work which found the expected correlation between teen births and poorer outcomes for women, this paper tested the causation hypothesis by looking only at teens who became pregnant instead of all teens, and it separated teen pregnancies between those who gave birth and those who didn’t for one reason or another. This effectively separates the factors that lead women to become pregnant from the actual effects of teen motherhood itself on life outcomes, and their finding was surprising to the researchers — teen motherhood does not lead to poorer life outcomes.  Rather, the interpretation of the data is that socio-economic factors or individual characteristics which cause some teens to be more likely to get pregnant are also independently associated with poorer life outcomes, not causally related.  

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         on January 2, 2011 at 11:30 am

         I will look up the article you reference, and read it myself.  Thanks for the ref.

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         santiago on January 4, 2011 at 10:15 am

         As I cited in a comment to dataguy, this is the paper that I was thinking of in my original comment to this diary: “Teenage Childbearing and Its Life Cycle Consequences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment,” Journal of Human Resources, 2005, vol. 40, issue 3  This one looks at the effect on mothers, but the issue it raises is that of trying to separate the actual factor of teen motherhood from the socio-economic or just personal characteristics that lead some women to be more likely to become pregnant as teens. The same would have to be applied to outcomes for their children to really test the causality of teen motherhood separate from other factors which may just be incidentally correlated with poorer outcomes.