This 20-year longitudinal study showed that the young adult offspring of teen mothers are at risk for a range of adverse outcomes including early school leaving, unemployment, early parenthood, and violent offending. We tested how much the effect of teen childbearing on offspring outcomes could be accounted for by social selection (in which a woman's characteristics that make her an inadequate parent also make her likely to bear children in her teens) versus social influence (in which the consequences of becoming a teen mother also bring harm to her children, apart from any characteristics of her own). The results provided support for both mechanisms. Across outcomes, maternal characteristics and family circumstances together accounted for approximately 39% of the effect of teen childbearing on offspring outcomes. Consistent with a social-selection hypothesis, maternal characteristics accounted for approximately 18% of the effect of teen childbearing on offspring outcomes; consistent with a social-influence hypothesis, family circumstances accounted for 21% of the teen childbearing effect after controlling for maternal characteristics. These results suggest that public policy initiatives should be targeted not only at delaying childbearing in the population but at supporting individual at-risk mothers and their children.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 20. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 17 June 2023.
All research outputs
#2,399,984
of 34,517,649 outputs
Outputs from Development & Psychopathology
#297
of 2,072 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#2,472
of 62,569 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Development & Psychopathology
#2
of 6 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,517,649 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 93rd percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,072 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 15.2. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 62,569 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 6 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than 4 of them.
