Mother's education level can help her predict her children's success in reading and math. In fact, that success is greater if she had her child later in life, suggests a new University of Michigan study. Sandra Tang, a U-M psychology research fellow and the study's lead author, said children of mothers 19 and older usually enter kindergarten with higher levels of achievement. These kids continue to excel in math and reading at higher levels through eighth grade when compared to children of mothers 18 and younger.
"These results provide compelling evidence that having a child during adolescence has enduring negative consequences for the achievement of the next generation," Tang said.
The negative consequences of teen mothers not only affect the child born when the mother was an adolescent, but they affect the mother's subsequent children as well.
Pamela Davis-Kean, associate professor of psychology and a research associate professor at the Institute for Social Research and Center for Human Growth and Development, said the findings present good news and bad news.
The good news is that the children of teen mothers who continue their education after having children do better academically than children of teen moms who did not continue, she said.
"However, these children--and other children born to the mother when she wasn't an adolescent--never catch up in achievement across time to children whose mothers had them after completing their education," Davis-Kean said. "This group continues to carry a risk for lower achievement."
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In 14,279 cases, the children's math and reading scores were collected in third, fifth and eighth grades.
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Trends indicate that mothers who give birth during adolescence have much lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment in comparison to their counterparts who delay pregnancy.
Given that growth in achievement generally stays the same across time for math and reading for all children in the sample, these patterns highlight the importance of investing in early interventions that target adolescent mothers and provide them with the skills needed to promote their children's learning, Tang said.
Source-Eurekalert