Adolescent Mothers

Teenage Motherhood within the Human Development System

The view that adolescent pregnancy is an enormous social burden in the United States may be due to the number of teenage mothers. In recent years, there has been a decrease in teenage pregnancy rates, with the teen birthrate falling from 37 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 17, in 1990, to 27 births per 1,000 females in this age range, in 2002. Nevertheless, in 2000, there were 48 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19 and a total of 157,209 babies born to females aged 15 to 17 (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2003).

Kids Count (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2003) reports that teenage mothers younger than age 18 are likely to be unmarried, likely to have not completed high school, and will have a child who is likely to be living in poverty. Earnings are often low or absent among teenage mothers, especially if they are high school dropouts, and, in turn, the children of teenage mothers have an increased probability of themselves being high school dropouts and becoming teenage mothers (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2003; Coley & Chase-Lansdale, 1998). Moreover, adolescent pregnancy is linked to other risk behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, early initiation of sexual activity (Coley & Chase-Lansdale, 1998), and other delinquent behavior (Hockaday, Crase, Shelley, & Stockdale, 2000).

Perhaps based on the presence of these associations between teenage pregnancy and motherhood and problem behaviors, the majority of the studies and articles published about teenage pregnancy in the last couple of decades take the deficit-model perspective on adolescent mothers and parenting. In fact, in 1987, the National Research Council Panel on Adolescent Pregnancy and Childbearing published “a monumental review of the literature that documents in great detail a host of negative consequences on the educational, economic, and marital careers of young mothers” (Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, & Chase-Lansdale, 1989, p. 315). Only in very recent years has there been information available that regards adolescent motherhood from a positive youth development standpoint.

A Postive Youth Development Perspective

Given the behaviors that covary with teenage pregnancy, it is not surprising that adolescents engaging in risk behaviors, such as teenage mothers, have traditionally been viewed through the lens of the deficit model. However, this is not the only approach to helping these teenagers find healthier and more successful paths to better lives. The positive youth development perspective is “predicated on the ideas that every young person has the potential for successful, healthy development and that all youth possess the capacity for positive development” (Lerner, Brentano, Dowling, & Anderson, 2002, p. 11). Thus, whereas in the past, youth have been treated as problems to be managed, this new vision views adolescents as resources to be developed.

...