Explanation:
To understand the consequences of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing for the family, 189 mothers from three types offamilies were studied: families in which all teenage daughters had never been pregnant, families in which only one teenager was currently pregnant, and families in which only one teenager had delivered a baby within the previous 6 months. in the latter two family types, the current pregnancy or childbearing was the first to occur in the family. Mothers were assessed twice, 13 months apart. Results indicated that, compared with the mothers of never-pregnant teens, the mothers of parenting teens monitored their children less. expected less of their older daughters, and were more accepting of teenage childbearing. Across-time analyses showed that, in families in which the teenager was initially pregnant, mothers monitored and communicated less with their other children and were more accepting of teenage sex after the older daughter gave birth. In families in which the teenager was initially parenting, mothers perceived more difficulty for their teenage daughters and reported being less strict with their other children across time.
Keywords: adolescent childbearing, adolescent pregnancy, Hispanics, parent-adolescent communication, parenting, younger siblings’ pregnancy risk
When an adolescent becomes pregnant and bears a child, it is reasonable to expect that this affects the adolescent's family, if only because the new baby often becomes part of the family household and requires a great deal of care and attention. But how adolescent childbearing impacts the adolescent's family of origin, particularly her parents’ parenting and her siblings’ development, has been a completely neglected area of study. With close to 80% of teens continuing to reside within their family of origin 1 year after they give birth (Hogan, Hao, & Parish, 1990; Trent & Harlan, 1994) and with the younger siblings of teenage mothers themselves having an elevated rate of early parenthood (Cox, Emans, & Bithoney, 1993; East & Felice, 1992; Friede et al., 1986), such effects on the family surely have important practical and policy implications.
The research that has examined the impact of adolescent childbearing on the family has generally taken three forms: the effects of teenage childbearing on a family's intergenerational structure, whereby a history of early parenting creates an age-condensed multigenerational family structure (e.g., Burton, 1995, 1996a, 1996b; Ladner, 1988); its effects on family residential patterns and household composition (e.g., Hogan et al., 1990; Trent & Harlan, 1994); and its effect of eliciting family support, particularly child-care assistance from the teen's mother (Brooks-Gunn & Chase-Lansdale, 1991; Furstenberg & Crawford, 1978). This last area of research has examined the quality of grandmothers’ parenting (Chase-Lansdale, Brooks-Gunn, & Zamsky, 1994) and its relation to outcomes of the teen's child (Spieker & Bensley, 1994) and to qualities of the adolescent's parenting (East & Felice, 1996). What these studies lack, however, is an analysis of how families change or adapt specifically in response to a teenager's pregnancy and birth.
This study also sought to determine how mothers’ time spent caring for their new grandchildren impacts their ability to supervise their own children. It was expected that as the number of hours that mothers spent caring for their grandchildren increased, mothers’ monitoring of their own children would decrease. Finally, the mothers of parenting teens answered questions about how their older daughter's childbearing had affected their daughter's life. Mothers’ responses to these items were analyzed across time to determine whether a mother's perceptions of the effects of her daughter's childbearing changed across the daughter's first year postpartum.
