Is Older Better? Adolescent Parenthood and Maltreatment

A commercial used to feature the slogan "You're not getting older, you're getting better." This view has been widely held regarding parenting skill. Adolescent parents have been seen as especially at risk for abuse and neglect of their children, and older parents have been seen as being at less risk. Research indicating that children of adolescent parent are at a disadvantage in some respects has been taken as proof of the effect of young maternal age upon parenting skill. The idea that adolescent parenthood is a social problem with unquestioned negative consequences is almost a truism. Furstenberg [1976: 13] commented:One possible explanation for the lack of research on the consequences of early childbearing is that those consequences appear obvious. Virtually everyone who is familiar with the phenomenon is firmly convinced that adolescent parenthood disrupts the normal life course of the mother....It is assumed that unscheduled parenthood propels the young mother into a role for which she is only casually prepared and often feels unready to assume.The present study examined the relationship between age of parent and maltreatment by grouping parents of children in foster care and maltreating parents in Illinois into two categories--adolescent parents and adult parents--and examining whether adolescent parents were overrepresented within the maltreating and out-of-home care populations. The hypothesis in this analysis was that adolescent status would not increase the likelihood of membership in the maltreating or out-of-home care populations. The following review of the literature summarizes the findings of previous analyses of the adolescent parent population.RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENT PARENTHOOD AND MALTREATMENTOne source of support for the prevailing belief that young parents are poor quality parents has been research showing children of adolescent parents to be at a health and developmental disadvantage. Early studies of children born to adolescent mothers showed an increased risk of low birthweight infants and infant death. Newer studies, however, indicate that adequate prenatal care can prevent these problems [Baldwin & Cain 1981; Phipps-Yonas 1980]. One such study [Zuckerman et al. 1983] compared the neonatal development of 275 infants of adolescents with 423 infants of nonadolescents. They found that poor neonatal outcomes were associated with factors other than age. Factors associated with poor neonatal outcome were (a) mothers who gained less weight in pregnancy than nonadolescents; (b) mothers who weighed less before pregnancy than nonadolescents; (c) being African American; and (d) maternal marijuana use during pregnancy. Male infants tended to have poorer neonatal outcomes than female infants.In another early study, Osofsky and Osofsky [1970], reporting on a program for low-income teen parents, noted that the infants of teen mothers began life smaller than infants of older mothers, caught up, and then fell behind again after six months of age. Osofsky and Osofsky speculated that poverty would produce this pattern, since birthweight and growth after age six months would reflect quality of diet available (the diet of infants less than six months old consisted mostly of formula, which was readily available to these mothers).Furstenberg [1976: 208], in an early study of adolescent parents and their children, found that the cognitive level of the study children was "considerably lower than that of the comparison groups and slightly below that of the classmate children." He determined that the paternal absence, low parental education, and economic deprivation that often accompany adolescent parenthood were associated with these results. Full-time mothers were less likely to develop the cognitive skills of their children than were mothers who shared child care responsibilities with the father, other family members, or other individuals. In regard to social development of the children, Furstenberg found that although children of adolescent parents were not socially maladjusted as a consequence, favorable economic conditions and the presence of a father did contribute to better social adjustment. …