The goals of this project are to describe the psychosocial context of adolescent sexual behavior, pregnancy, and parenthood and to explore the longterm effects of early parenthood on mothers, fathers, and children. Our most recent studies have involved data from large nationally representative samples and have addressed two basic sets of questions. A. Characteristics of adolescent parents. Regardless of race, adolescent parenthood is one symptom of a wide variety of psychosocial problems. Compared with nonfathers and nonmothers of similar ages and backgrounds, adolescent parents are more likely to have a history of involvement with the police, school problems, and substance abuse. A problem behavior syndrome is especially marked among adolescent fathers. B. Correlates and consequences of adolescent parenthood. Younger adolescent mothers are lighter, gain less weight during pregnancy, seek prenatal care later in their pregnancies, and tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes than are older adolescent and adult mothers. Children of very young adolescent mothers are more likely to be born prematurely and unusually low in birthweight. Among Black and Hispanic mothers, maternal age is not associated with measures of their children's cognitive performance at ages 5-14. For Whites, the children of very young adolescent women have the poorest levels of cognitive performance. Overall, maternal intelligence and socioeconomic status are better predictors of children's performance than is maternal age.
