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Author: Meyers, David E.
Resulting in 2 citations.
1. Moore, Kristin Anderson
Meyers, David E.
Morrison, Donna Ruane
Nord, Christine Winquis
Teenage Childbearing and Poverty
Presented: Bethesda, MD, NICHD Conference, "Outcomes of Early Childbearing: An Appraisal of Recent Evidence", National Institutes of Health, May 18-19, 1992
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Age at First Birth; Age at First Marriage; Childbearing, Adolescent; Fertility; Hispanics; Poverty

An association between teenage parenthood and subsequent poverty has been noted for several decades. However, because early childbearing is more common among women from disadvantaged backgrounds, whether teenage childbearing increases the probability of poverty over and above the risk due to background factors has not been clear. In this paper, the effect of the timing of the first birth on the ratio of family income to the poverty threshold for the family is examined using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. All women are age 27 when studied. Direct effects are not hypothesized; rather the effect of age at first birth is expected to be mediated by intervening variables including educational attainment, age at first marriage, family size, women's work experience and earnings, and the earnings of other members of the household. Structural equation models are estimated, taking into account background variables that affect both selection into early childbearing and the outcome variables in the model, and employing a variant of Amemiya's principle to deal with problems of censoring and selectivity. Results indicate that age at first birth has a substantial effect on the ratio of family income to the poverty threshold at age 27 among blacks, Hispanics, and whites, though the effect is particularly large among blacks and Hispanics. Age at first birth is found to have a significant direct effect on highest grade completed and number of children among all three race/ethnicity groups. In addition, age at first birth has a significant direct effect on age at first marriage among whites. These variables in turn affect family income and thus poverty.
Bibliography Citation
Moore, Kristin Anderson, David E. Meyers, Donna Ruane Morrison and Christine Winquis Nord. "Teenage Childbearing and Poverty." Presented: Bethesda, MD, NICHD Conference, "Outcomes of Early Childbearing: An Appraisal of Recent Evidence", National Institutes of Health, May 18-19, 1992.
2. Morrison, Donna Ruane
Moore, Kristin Anderson
Meyers, David E.
Maternal Age at First Birth and Children's Behavior and Cognitive Development
Presented: Bethesda, MA, NICHD Conference, "Outcomes of Early Childbearing: An Appraisal of Recent Evidence", May 1992
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Age at First Birth; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Children, Behavioral Development; Fathers, Absence; Fertility; General Assessment; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT)

The aim of this paper is to further illuminate the processes through which an early birth affects child well-being. Since it is not possible to capture the developmental status and well-being of a child with a single indicator, such as an IQ score, most child experts prefer a developmental profile that covers a breadth of dimensions or domains. For this reason, this study examines the effect of the mother's age at first birth on three measures related to the child's cognitive development and academic achievement -- the reading and mathematics sub-scales of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test cognitive, and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) -- and one measure of social behavior -- the child's score on the mother-rated Behavior Problems Index (BPI). The study uses a national-level sample of children and limits its analysis to first borns to eliminate the possible confounding influence of birth order. The explicit assumption of the present study is that the consequences of being born to a teenage mother do not derive from the mother's age per se, but are largely the product of the correlates of early child-bearing such as low maternal education and father absence, some of which reflect selectivity into early motherhood and some of which are consequences of the timing of her first birth.
Bibliography Citation
Morrison, Donna Ruane, Kristin Anderson Moore and David E. Meyers. "Maternal Age at First Birth and Children's Behavior and Cognitive Development." Presented: Bethesda, MA, NICHD Conference, "Outcomes of Early Childbearing: An Appraisal of Recent Evidence", May 1992.