Abstract
Adolescent childbearing has received decreasing attention from academics and policymakers in recent years, which may in part reflect the decline in its incidence. Another reason may be its uncoupling from nonmarital childbearing. Adolescent childbearing became problematized only when it began occurring predominantly outside marriage. In recent decades, there have been historic rises in the rate of nonmarital childbearing, and importantly, the rise has been steeper among older mothers than among adolescent mothers. Today, two out of five births are to unmarried women, and the majority of these are to adults, not adolescents. Nonmarital childbearing is in and of itself associated with lower income and poorer maternal and child outcomes. However, unmarried adolescent mothers might face more difficulties than unmarried adult mothers due to their developmental status, education, living arrangements, and long-term prospects for work. If this is true, then the focus on adolescent mothers ought to continue. We suggest several facets of adolescent motherhood deserving of further study, and recommend that future research use unmarried mothers in their early 20s as a realistic comparison group.
Highlights
Adolescent childbearing has received decreasing attention from academics and policymakers in recent years, which may in part reflect the decline in its incidence
It is our impression that the amount of attention paid by academics, policymakers, and the public to adolescent childbearing as a social problem in the U.S has markedly declined since the 1980s
We propose here that in addition to their drop in rates, another factor that may have contributed to adolescent pregnancy and childbearing’s retreat from public view was a related demographic trend unfolding over the same period: the increase in nonmarital childbearing
Summary
Adolescent childbearing has received decreasing attention from academics and policymakers in recent years, which may in part reflect the decline in its incidence. This issue gained new recognition as a social problem with the publication in 1994 of Growing Up with a Single Parent [6], in which McLanahan and Sandefeur reported that adolescents who had grown up in single-parent families had poorer academic performance, lower college enrollment, and higher birth rates than those in two-parent families.
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