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Title: Does Young Maternal Age Adversely Affect Child Development? Evidence from Cousin Comparisons in the United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Geronimus, Arline T.
Korenman, Sanders D.
Hillemeier, Marianne M.
Does Young Maternal Age Adversely Affect Child Development? Evidence from Cousin Comparisons in the United States
Population and Development Review 20,3 (September 1994): 585-609
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: Population Council
Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Child Development; Childbearing, Adolescent; Disadvantaged, Economically; General Assessment; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Mothers, Adolescent; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Siblings; Socioeconomic Factors; Test Scores/Test theory/IRT; Verbal Memory (McCarthy Scale)

The construction of teenage childbearing as a public problem, and the degree to which it should be a source of social or policy concern, have been the subject of numerous empirical investigations, theoretical analyses, commentaries, and controversy. While we do not review this literature in detail here, we highlight what we believe to be the most important theoretical tension and social scientific question to emerge from it. The theoretical tension is between whether teenage mothers are best understood as teenagers or as socioeconomically disadvantaged women, given the overrepresentation of socioeconomically disadvantaged teenagers among the ranks of teenage mothers. The social scientific question is the extent to which teen childbearing contributes causally to the social problems with which it is associated. One important area of social concern is the potential consequences of teen childbearing for offspring. In this article, we focus on early childhood development. The literature on child development in the United States has documented that, on average, children of young mothers score more poorly on cognitive and socioemotional measures and are at higher risk of poor school achievement than children of older mothers. While some investigators do not control for socioeconomic status when comparing child outcomes across maternal ages, many do take socioeconomic differences into account.
Bibliography Citation
Geronimus, Arline T., Sanders D. Korenman and Marianne M. Hillemeier. "Does Young Maternal Age Adversely Affect Child Development? Evidence from Cousin Comparisons in the United States." Population and Development Review 20,3 (September 1994): 585-609.