Pathways Child

A conference on "Outcomes of Early Childbearing: An Appraisal of Recent Evidence" brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers who study the effects of adolescent parenthood on social, economic, and health outcomes for mothers and their children. The conference's purpose was to review recent studies on the effects of maternal age on these outcomes and the factors that mediate and condition those effects. As such, it focused on the strong associations relative to the...
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A conference on "Outcomes of Early Childbearing: An Appraisal of Recent Evidence" brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers who study the effects of adolescent parenthood on social, economic, and health outcomes for mothers and their children. The conference's purpose was to review recent studies on the effects of maternal age on these outcomes and the factors that mediate and condition those effects. As such, it focused on the strong associations relative to the timing of first birth and such factors as education, earnings, marriage and marital stability, and poverty.

Because of the disadvantaged condition of many adolescent mothers, their increasing numbers, and the escalating proportion of these mothers who are unmarried, policy concern has continued to grow, leading to much research on the antecedents and consequences of early childbearing. In recent years longitudinal data have been studied in an effort to understand the processes leading to a variation in the timing of first birth and the direct and indirect pathways through which birth timing affects maternal and child outcomes. The conference reviewed the results of these studies and debated their implications for future research. This issue contains four papers from the conference, abstracts of all other presentations and a summary of some of the commentary.