Study highlights changing impact of teenage childbirth on women's education across generations

Different social contexts can transform the meaning and implications of life experiences. For example, a life event like giving birth to a teenager can have very different impacts depending on the time and societal norms. During the post-World War II baby boom, teenage births were relatively common. The 1960s, however, marked the beginning of a period marked by increasing economic benefits from women's education and changing norms regarding the timing of motherhood.

A study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham published in the American Journal of Sociology found that teenage births disrupted the education of newer cohorts of women more than those of older cohorts. These exacerbated effects among recent generations are due to increasing education costs for women in the second half of the 20th century, particularly for millennial women born between 1980 and 1984.

The study, led by Joseph D. Wolfe, Ph.D., and Mieke Beth Thomeer, Ph.D., both associate professors in the Department of Sociology in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences, alongside Shawn Bauldry, Ph.D., at Purdue, compared older millennial women to the silent generation and baby boomer women to show the changing importance of teen births for educational attainment.

“We sought to understand how the educational costs of teenage births were changing for women,” Wolfe said. “We chose these specific cohorts to represent women who experienced before, during, and after significant cultural shifts in women's education in the United States. We also considered different opportunities, constraints, and attitudes regarding age of women at first birth and their level of education.”

According to the study, educational differences between teen mothers and other women were more pronounced among millennial women with higher socioeconomic status because they had the greatest educational potential, given their origins. Women who gave birth later in this generation performed better in terms of education, indicating that giving birth in adolescence represented an increasing opportunity cost for women.

“Traditional views of teenage births view them as a 'social problem' to be avoided because they disrupt education and career advancement, but our research shows that the significance of teenage births for educational attainment depends both historical and socio-economic contexts,” Thomeer said.

Therefore, Thomeer suggests that rather than focusing solely on preventing teenage pregnancy to increase academic achievement, it is necessary to change the structural factors that have allowed certain groups of women to be more able to achieve success. go to college and avoid teenage pregnancy.

The researchers recommend that future studies integrate public policy information at multiple levels to better understand changes over time, because reproductive trends and their costs are strongly influenced by public policies.

“We hope that the results of this study will lead to policies focused on improving access to higher education, rather than just contraception and sex education, to reduce teenage births by making education a more attractive option,” Thomeer said.