"Parenting" Teenage Parents: A Clinician's Notes

Abstract

This editorial notes that articles published in scientific journals continually provide knowledge inspiration and motivation to practitioners who seek ongoing professional growth. Thus reports in the literature helped inspire the editor to create a series of school-based programs for adolescent fathers their children and partners in 1990. Two reports in this volume of Family Relations have reawakened that interest. This review notes that adolescent parenthood is a vital social concern because it requires a great investment of resources to prepare adolescents for adulthood and adolescent parenthood diverts this investment and exposes the parent to a host of additional problems attendant upon diminished self-sufficiency. Data indicate that the US has the highest rate of adolescent childbearing of any Westernized country with the most risk seen among Black youth growing up in impoverished single-parent homes and that US youth are more likely than their foreign peers to fail to protect themselves from pregnancy or disease. Recent research has investigated patterns of variables constituting unique profiles of risk factors the determinants of competent parenting among adolescents the promotion of competent parenting and motivations for attending parenting education classes and the use of peers to encourage socially responsible behavior. Additional research is needed to shed light on the role of developmental and motivational issues and of ethnicity and culture in family intervention programs. Complex models must be developed to reflect the integrated nature of problems (poverty neglect violence and substance abuse) faced by adolescents most in need and hardest to reach. Professionals must also become active in attempts to minimize the potentially bad effects of the current welfare reform movement.