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Title: The Well-Being of Children Born to Teen Mothers: Multiple Approaches to Assessing the Causal Links

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1.	Levine, Judith A. Emery, Clifton R. Pollack, Harold
1.	The Well-Being of Children Born to Teen Mothers: Multiple Approaches to Assessing the Causal Links Presented: Miami, FL, Society for Social Work Research 9th Annual Meeting, 2004 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) Keyword(s): Age at First Birth; Behavioral Problems; Childbearing, Adolescent; Childbearing, Premarital/Nonmarital; Grade Retention/Repeat Grade; Kinship; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes; School Progress; Sexual Activity; Substance Use; Truancy Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Children born to early-childbearers display high prevalence of problem behaviors and poor academic performance. Previous research indicates that many adverse outcomes stem from poverty or other risk-factors, not from early childbearing per se. This paper uses linked maternal-child data from the 1979-98 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to explore these questions in greater depth. Using the large sample size made possible through an expanded adolescent sample, we use three types of analyses to explore the causal impact of early-childbearing on subsequent child and adolescent outcomes. First, we run models using a variety of explicit controls for background factors. Second, we use a fixed-effect, cousin-comparison analysis to control for unobserved family characteristics that may influence child outcomes. Third, we examine outcomes among children born to women who had miscarriages during their teen years. Because teenagers who have miscarriages are in some ways similar to teens who carry infants to live birth, miscarriage data allows us to further scrutinize whether delayed childbearing is associated with improved outcomes. In all analyses, we find that teen childbearing plays only a small, if any, causal role in children's performance on standardized tests, reported use of marijuana, or fighting. Pre-birth characteristics of teen mothers, birth order, and family size are more important factors in determining this set of outcomes. For other outcomes, namely grade repetition, early sexual initiation, and truancy, the fixed effects and miscarriage analyses produce differing results. Teen childbearing has no sizeable or statistically significant results for any of our outcomes in the miscarriage analysis. However, the fixed effects results suggest teen childbearing is associated with grade retention in school, school truancy, and possibly with early initiation of sexual activity. We interpret these differing results to suggest that teen mothers share more in common with other young women who conceive, but due to miscarriage, do not carry their pregnancies to term than they do with their own siblings who delay childbearing. It is these commonalities that appear to drive the zero-order association between early fertility and several negative behavioral consequences for off-spring.
	Bibliography Citation Levine, Judith A., Clifton R. Emery and Harold Pollack. "The Well-Being of Children Born to Teen Mothers: Multiple Approaches to Assessing the Causal Links." Presented: Miami, FL, Society for Social Work Research 9th Annual Meeting, 2004.

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