Twenty years after a mostly black group of Baltimore women became adolescent mothers, the majority of their first-born children had not become adolescent parents, a finding that challenges the popular belief that the offspring of teenage mothers are themselves destined to become adolescent parents. Almost all of the offspring had had intercourse by age 19. About half of the young women had experienced a pregnancy before that age, and approximately one-third of the young men reported having impregnated a partner before age 19. The Baltimore youths were just as likely to have had a live birth before age 19 as were the children of teenage mothers in a national sample of urban blacks, and both of these groups were more likely to have done so than were the children of older mothers in the national sample. In the Baltimore sample, maternal welfare experience only increased a daughter's likelihood of early childbearing if welfare was received during her teenage years. Within the Baltimore sample, a direct comparison of the daughters who became adolescent mothers with their own mothers at a comparable age reveals that the daughters have bleaker educational and financial prospects than their mothers had, and are less likely to ever have married. These results suggest that today's teenage parents may be less likely than were previous cohorts of adolescent mothers to overcome the handicaps of early childbearing. This trend could portend the growth of an urban underclass, even though only a minority of the offspring of teenage mothers go on to become adolescent parents.

Adolescent↗

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Adolescent mothers and their children in later life.

The popular belief that early childbearing almost certainly leads to school dropout, subsequent unwanted births and economic dependence is greatly oversimplified, if not seriously distorted: A longitudinal study of over 300 primarily urban black women who gave birth as adolescents in the middle to late 1960s shows that a substantial majority completed high school, found regular employment and, even if they had at some point been on welfare, eventually managed to escape dependence on public assistance. Relatively few ended up with large families; most had fewer births than they had wanted or expected at the time they first became pregnant. The study also found that the pathways to success were surprisingly diverse. Although young women who gave birth at an early age were disadvantaged when compared with their peers who bore children later, huge variability existed. Teenage childbearing lowered the women's likelihood of economic success and increased their likelihood of having a large family. However, the women who had more economically secure and better-educated parents were more likely to succeed--perhaps as a result of receiving a greater amount of direct aid and having other family resources available. In addition, differences in educational motivation and performance were especially important factors. Young mothers who had been doing well in school and who had had high educational aspirations at the time of their first birth were much more likely than others to be successful later. Additional births at young ages also constrained the mothers' ability to attend school and accrue job experience. Women who had more children in the five years after their first birth did less well in school, had lower aspirations and came from more disadvantaged families than did women who curtailed their fertility. However, even when such factors were controlled for, subsequent fertility lowered the chances of economic success in later life. Changes in the mothers' life courses affected some aspect of their children's behavior at all ages, but there was no simple or recurring pattern of influence. For example, a mother's welfare receipt was associated with behavior problems in her child during the preschool years, but not later on. In contrast, the mother's marital status was not related to behavior problems during the preschool period but was clearly related to such problems during the child's adolescence.

Achievement↗

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Supporting teenagers' use of contraceptives: a comparison of clinic services.

A program to provide teenage family planning clinic patients with special services designed to improve their ability to practice contraception effectively and avoid conception produced neither of these expected effects. Two types of special services were tested in nine clinics: one, to promote greater involvement of the teenager's family through special counseling sessions (family support); and the other, to provide more frequent contact between the teenager and clinic staff through telephone calls (periodic support). The services were provided in the six weeks following the first clinic visit. Only 36 percent of the girls who agreed to be in the family support group attended any counseling sessions, and only five percent of them came with a parent. Participation was greater in the periodic support group--84 percent of teenagers in the group received the follow-up phone calls. During the 15 months following the initial clinic visit, there were no significant differences in regularity of contraceptive use and pregnancy rates between the teenagers who received the special support services and those who received only the regular clinic services. About 40 percent of the special-service groups reported always using a contraceptive method during the study period, compared with 48 percent of controls; and about 40 percent of the former said they had rarely or never used a method, compared with 27 percent of the latter. The cumulative 15-month pregnancy rate was about 13 percent in both the special-service and the control groups.

Adolescent↗

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Family communication and teenagers' contraceptive use.

Improving communication about sex and birth control between parents and their children has often been cited as a means to encourage young people to use contraceptives more effectively. In an attempt to test this hypothesis, we interviewed 290 adolescents at family planning clinics in southeastern Pennsylvania three times in the course of 15 months about their communication with their families and their use of contraceptives. At the time of their first clinic visit, two-fifths of the teenagers said that their mothers knew that they had gone to the clinic; this proportion rose to almost three-fifths six months later and to about three-quarters at the end of 15 months. However, the proportion of teenagers who said that they had discussed sex or birth control with their mothers remained almost the same; the proportion who said that they would never discuss such topics with their mothers also remained fairly constant. The teenagers whose mothers knew of their clinic attendance at the time of their first visit were no more likely to have had extensive conversations with their mothers about sex or contraception than were the teenagers whose mothers found out afterwards. Among a subsample of the mothers of these young women, fewer than one-third said that they had ever discussed their daughters' sexual activity with them. There was only a modest level of correspondence between the mothers' responses and their daughters' replies; for the most part, the mothers thought that they were much more communicative about sex and birth control than their daughters perceived them to be.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Adolescent↗

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Contraceptive continuation among adolescents attending family planning clinics.

An attempt to find a reliable way to measure contraceptive continuation among teenagers was made in a study of 445 adolescents under age 18 who made an initial visit to one of nine federally funded family planning clinics in the Philadelphia area in 1980 and 1981. The participants were interviewed at their initial visit and at six and 15 months to collect information on background characteristics, pregnancy history and contraceptive use. A cross-check of the information on contraceptive use reported during the study showed that 38 percent of the respondents who reported that they had been continuous users during the 15 months supplied information at other points indicating that they had not always used contraceptives during that period. In an attempt to examine the effects of adolescent reporting errors on measures of contraceptive use, the investigators constructed three alternative measures of contraceptive continuation. The simplest measure assessed current use at 15 months. A second measure accepted only reports of continuous use at 15 months and ignored inconsistent data. The third measure corrected for inconsistent data. Applying these measures to the study population produced proportions of contraceptive continuation ranging from a low of 43 percent when the most stringent measure was used to a high of 82 percent for the current-use category. Whatever the measure used, much of the discontinuation appears to have occurred in the first three months after the initial visit to a family planning clinic.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Adolescent↗

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Parental involvement: selling family planning clinics short.

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Adolescent↗

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Family support: helping teenage mothers to cope.

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Adolescent↗

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The impact of an increase in family planning services on the teenage population of Philadelphia.

In an assessment conducted 30 months after a Philadelphia-area project increased the resources that community family planning agencies devoted to teenage services, teenagers in targeted communities showed no generalized improvement in rates of pregnancy and childbearing, in knowledge or use of clinic services, or in attitudes toward contraception compared with those of teenagers in the entire city. Samples of adolescents aged 14-18 from the clinics' catchment areas and from the entire city were interviewed in mid-1988, when the project's activities began, and 2.5 years later. The results suggest that while community family planning clinics may provide effective services to the teenagers who seek them out, they may not be the most effective strategy for decreasing rates of pregnancy and childbearing in the overall teenage population.

Adolescent↗

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Does condom availability make a difference? An evaluation of Philadelphia's health resource centers.

In 1992, nine Philadelphia high schools opened drop-in centers where students could receive reproductive health information, condoms and general health referrals. Analyses of survey data collected in 1991 and 1993 suggest that the presence of the condom availability program did not increase the level of sexual activity among students in these schools and may have contributed to safer sex practices. The proportion of students who had used a condom at last intercourse increased from 52% to 58%; although the change was not statistically significant, it exceeded the increase in a group of comparison schools. Changes in the proportions of students who had ever had intercourse, who had had sex in the previous four weeks, who had used a condom at last intercourse and who had recently had unprotected sex were greatest in schools with higher levels of program usage; however, only the decline in recent unprotected intercourse among students in high-use schools (from 14% to 6%) approached statistical significance.

Adolescent↗

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The social consequences of teenage parenthood.

The adolescent mothers consistently experienced great difficulty in realizing their life plans, when compared with their classmates who did not become pregnant premaritally in their early teens. Marital instability, school disruption, economic problems, and difficulty in family size regulation and child-rearing were some of the complications brought on by their premature, unscheduled childbearing.

Adolescent↗