Consequences of teen pregnancy for mothers, infants, and communities

¶ … consequences of teen pregnancy to the mother? To the infant? To the community?

Teen pregnancy

The modern day society is a paradox; teenagers have more access to information than ever before; they are able to access sexual information and even protection methods; they can also easily learn about the negative consequences of sex. Still, they start their sexual lives at early ages. One of the more common problems of teenager intercourse is represented by the incidence of adolescent pregnancy, which can occur as a result of abuse, social and peer pressure, lack of education, poor socio-economic conditions and so on.

The impact of teenager pregnancy is quite vast, revealing effects on all mother, child and the society. At the level of the mothers, who usually have their child out of wedlock, the impacts can be emotionally traumatic, yet these are more salient and private. What is however observed by research is that there are complex socio-economic impacts for these young women, who seldom get to graduate, and end up with low incomes and are mostly dependent on state aid. Additionally, the teenage mothers have more troubles finding stable partners than women of the same age, without a child.

"There is a strong statistical association between the age at which a woman has her first child and her subsequent socio-economic well-being. For examples, women who have babies during their teens tend to have low levels of education, employment and earnings, and high levels of dependence on public assistance. They also spend more time than average as single parents" (Hoffmann and Maynard, 2008).

At the level of the children, their physical health is seldom directly impacted as there exists no direct connection between the health risks of a child born to a mother in her 20s or 30s, or to a teen mother. Still, impacts are obvious at a socio-economic level, in the meaning that the child will be less provided for than a child coming from a two parent family and conceived at a more mature stage in the lives of the parents. Additionally, the more important impacts at the level of the children of adolescent mothers are represented by the "shorter and longer term impact […], especially in terms of their physical and emotional development" (Arai, 2009).

At the level of their own behavior, the children of adolescent mothers are more likely to develop aggressive manners of conduct, and they will also have a higher degree of developing cognitive difficulties. They also reveal higher rates of high school drop out (77 per cent graduation rate for children of teen parents as opposed to 89 per cent graduation rate for children of more mature women) and the crime rates among this population of youth from adolescent mothers is higher than the crime rate among youth from older mothers -- 10.3 per cent incarceration rate versus 3.8 incarceration rate for the second category (the Florida State University).