The goal of the proposed research is to understand the social and psychological factors that precipitate academic failures and socioemotional problems in children of adolescent mothers as they reach late adolescence (age 18). Salient characteristics in teenage mothers have been identified during infancy and early childhood and, in combination with emergent characteristics during childhood, including MR/DD, are used to predict development at ages 8, 10, and 14, thus setting the stage for assessing outcomes during late adolescence. Measures of maternal and child functioning for 102 dyads will be gathered when participants reach 18 years of age. The central focus is on predicting academic achievement, socioemotional adjustment, and conduct disorders as well as isolating the precursors of resilient development, using new and already gathered maternal, child, and social-environmental data. The selection of predictor variables (both risk and protective factors) has been guided by a conceptual model of adolescent parenting that features maternal cognitive readiness, socioemotional adjustment, parenting behaviors, and child/adolescent characteristics, such as attachment, self-regulation, exposure to violence, and father involvement. The selection of mediator, moderator, and outcome variables has been influenced by our interests in metacognitive theory, academic failures among at-risk students, mental retardation, and psychopathologies as the target children transition into late adolescence. All of the measures to be collected at 18 should be considered within the context of data already gathered during pregnancy, infancy, childhood, and early adolescence as part of previous grants. The project's overall aim is to identify the factors that underlie major, but not well understood, problems, including developmental delays and delinquency in children of teen mothers as they move through adolescence. We are especially interested in documenting, predicting, and understanding the causes of """"""""risky behaviors"""""""" during adolescence as well as factors that lead to resilience, as reflected in a set of 10 major hypotheses. Secondary interests lie in tracing maternal development and interrelating maternal and child-adolescent developmental trajectories using HLM. The significance of the proposed project lies in the attempt to unravel the """"""""new morbidity phenomenon"""""""" in a representative sample of adolescent mothers and their children over an 18-year period through the use of a prospective, longitudinal design.
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