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Maternal Health Status and Early Childbearing: A Test of the Weathering Hypothesis

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Applied Demography and Public Health

Part of the book series: Applied Demography Series ((ADS,volume 3))

Abstract

Early childbearing, especially as an adolescent, has been labeled by one former president as the country’s “most important social problem” (Clinton 1995). Conventional wisdom suggests that having a child as a teenager is detrimental for maternal well-being, especially educational attainment and labor market outcomes, but also for interpersonal outcomes, such as relationship quality with partners and exposure to intimate violence. Many studies confirm such expectations (see Hayes 1987). Empirically, teenage childbearing has been linked to lower levels of completed education (Hotz et al. 1997; Fletcher and Wolfe 2009), lower wages and earnings and generally worse labor market outcomes (Chevalier and Viitanen 2003; Klepinger et al. 1999), and lower rates of marriage and higher overall fertility (Bennett et al. 1995; Hoffman et al. 1993), although some studies have suggested the negative economic and social consequences of teen pregnancy and childbearing are not as large as once thought (Furstenberg 1991; Lawlor and Shaw 2002; Scally 2002; Rich-Edwards 2002).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Throughout the paper we use the terms African American and black and Latino and Hispanic interchangeably.

  2. 2.

    Of the 380 births we observe in the analytic sample only 16 occurred after the daughter was married. In 14 of those 16 cases the birth occurred by the daughter’s next birthday which suggests that the young woman may have known of her pregnancy at the time she married (i.e., these may have been “shotgun” weddings). The remaining two cases involved a birth two years after the year of the wedding. Because we only have the year of birth and the year of the marriage we cannot definitively identify whether the young woman would have been aware of her pregnancy at the time of the wedding. An additional 24 cases experience birth and marriage in the same year. All 40 of these cases were considered censored at the time of first marriage.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by a seed grant from the RAND Population Research Center (Meadows and Beckett, PIs). Support was also provided by Panel Study of Income Dynamics (Beckett, and Meadows, PIs).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RAND Corporation, 1776 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA, 90401, USA

    Sarah O. Meadows, Megan K. Beckett, Marc N. Elliott & Christine Petersen

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  1. Sarah O. Meadows
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  2. Megan K. Beckett
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  3. Marc N. Elliott
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  4. Christine Petersen
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Correspondence to Sarah O. Meadows .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Dept of Demography, University of Texas, San Antonio, West Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard 501, San Antonio, 78207, Texas, USA

    Nazrul Hoque

  2. , Arkansas Department of Health, Health Statistics Branch, West Markham Street, Slot 19 4815, Little Rock, 72205-3867, Arkansas, USA

    Mary A. McGehee

  3. , School of Public Health, The University of Texas, John Smith Drive, Suite 200 7411, San Antonio, 78229, Texas, USA

    Benjamin S. Bradshaw

Appendix A: Descriptive Statistics for the Imputed Sample

Appendix A: Descriptive Statistics for the Imputed Sample

Table A.1 Descriptive statistics (imputed sample)
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Meadows, S.O., Beckett, M.K., Elliott, M.N., Petersen, C. (2013). Maternal Health Status and Early Childbearing: A Test of the Weathering Hypothesis. In: Hoque, N., McGehee, M., Bradshaw, B. (eds) Applied Demography and Public Health. Applied Demography Series, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6140-7_11

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