Growing Up Fast

Re-Visioning Adolescent Mothers' Transitions to Young Adulthood

Bonnie J. Ross Leadbeater

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848725713
• eBook ISBN: 9781317702030
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The first edition of Growing Up Fast attempted to counter the stereotype of poor, minority adolescent mothers and describe the diversity of their educational, work, parenting, and relationship experiences. The volume followed a strengths-based approach to understanding why some mothers appeared resilient to the stresses of early parenting, compared to their peers, and what obstacles undermine resiliency for some of these young women. We hear their stories in their own words. We also see how many disadvantaged mothers go on to succeed in school, work, and parenting while avoiding many of the risk associated with teen parenting . The research is based on a six-year study of 120 young disadvantaged mothers and their children from New York City. It uniquely combines the analysis of longitudinal questionnaire data with qualitative analysis of extensive interviews conducted with these women focusing on the first six years after their child was born. A past winner of the Society for Research on Adolescence best book award, Growing Up Fast is a fascinating study of human resilience that will continue to be recognized for its contribution to individuals involved in program development and policymaking with teenage parenting.

A new introductory chapter to the book suggests that we can look at the previous findings through a new lens that emphasizes not only the diversity of outcomes for young mothers and the sources of their strengths, but also asks what we can learn from these women about supporting their educational and work goals, as they transition to adulthood. New attention to emerging adulthood shows that this is a critical stage of life when the foundations for health and healthy life styles are laid down. Developmental tasks of this phase include building the capacity for financial and residential independence through post-secondary education and job training, and establishing stable sources of support from parents, romantic partners, and peers for all youth. Leadbeater addresses the societal changes that make these tasks particularly salient for young women and focuses attention on how we can support youth who make this transition with children.

CHAPTER
1

Beyond the Stereotypes: What Kind of Problem Is Teenage Parenting?

Ample research has demonstrated the long- and short-term consequences and social costs of teenage parenting (see Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, & Morgan, 1987; Harris, 1997; Hayes, 1987; Lawson & Rhodes, 1993; Musick, 1993; Nathanson, 1991). Recent volumes have also presented statistical trends in adolescent child-bearing (e.g., Hayes, 1987), addressed the psychology of teenage mothers who have been sexually abused (Musick, 1993), and presented historical and political issues related to adolescent childbirth and parenting (e.g., Lawson & Rhodes, 1993; Luker, 1996; Nathanson, 1991). This research paints a clear, consistent picture of the enduring difficulties that accompany too early parenting, as well as the clear economic advantages of postponing parenthood in favor of advanced education. However, risk statistics comparing outcomes for adolescent mothers with those who delay childbearing until after age 20 and models that identify predictors of negative outcomes for adolescent mothers and their children can give the misleading impression that such risks, even when small, are certainties for adolescent mothers.

Indeed the stereotypical adolescent mother persists. She is a poor, often African-American or Hispanic female school dropout who is a victim of disadvan-taged social circumstances, male sexual advances, and the inability to “just say no” to her own sexual urges. Her adolescence and education interrupted prematurely, she is haplessly thrust into a life course of welfare dependence as the single parent of a succession of out-of-wedlock children. She has also become the symbol of an array of interrelated social problems including increases in teenage sexual activity, the number of female-headed households, young children living in poverty, and welfare costs. It is these images with which adolescent mothers struggle, which they resist, and, in some cases, become in their rapid transition to young adulthood.

Although nationally only 30% of teen mothers fail to graduate from high school and only 3% have more than three children (Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1994), teenage mothers who become responsible, productive young parents are mistakenly seen as the resilient exceptions to the norm. Newspaper anecdotes occasionally outline the harried life of this exceptional adolescent mother who struggles against great odds to stay in school or find work. The lack of understanding of the within-group differences in adolescent mothers’ transitions into early adulthood fuels myths and misconceptions of their inevitable doom. Not knowing who does well, despite high-risk circumstances, and why, renders a uniform picture of social and personal failure that discourages policy analysts, program developers, potential employers, and the adolescent mothers from envisioning more positive futures.

Policy development continues to address the needs of the stereotypical teen mother. Failure to witness the successes as well as the hardships of young mothers undermines intervention efforts. Focusing solely on the insurmountable needs of the mythical adolescent mother of three or more children who has a ninth-grade education and lives on welfare in substandard housing means less attention is given to the obstacles that threaten to derail working adolescent mothers. By ignoring the majority who succeed, we fail to capitalize on the motivations and supports that propel these adolescent mothers to strive to improve their own and their children’s futures. As our expectations for these young families are limited, so too is the search for cost-effective, targeted interventions that can address the specific needs of those mothers who can benefit from them.

FOCUSING ON DIVERSITY

This book seeks to broaden knowledge of the life options open to and sought by African-American and Hispanic poor adolescent mothers from New York City. When pictured among a collage of negative stereotypes of teenage mothers, the young women from the Harlem and Bronx districts who were participants in what we refer to as the “New York study” of adolescent mothers are among those least expected to succeed. Yet we focus precisely on this group because their lives illuminate the diverse pathways to young adulthood that these young women continuously construct and reconstruct. Becoming a parent was a turning point in all their lives, but they responded to this event as individuals with differing abilities, aspirations, and supports. They surprise us most with the diversity of their solutions to living in poverty and with the intensity of their desire to make their children’s lives better. They also surprise us with the height of their youthful ambition when they succeed and the depth of their pain when they fail. We argue that adolescent mothers who enter young adulthood with the skills and desires to care for themselves and their children are not the resilient few. Rather, we examine the multidimensional processes that characterize the resilience in some areas of their lives of the majority of these young women.

Our progress in dealing with the problems of teenage parents has been blocked by sharp divisions over the causes of teenage parenting (poverty, sexual promiscuity, limited access to contraception or abortions, poor educational opportunities). Little agreement exists on how adolescent childbearing should be dealt with (prevention, punishment, or intervention) or by whom (individual, family, or state controls).

Embedded in the controversy are fragments of past social, health, and moral debates that fail to accommodate changing roles for women. Those who would respond to increased adolescent sexual activity with education about responsible contraception use still square off against those who advocate abstinence to end teenage promiscuity. Advocates of costly comprehensive services to improve the education and employability of teenage mothers are opposed by those who believe these services do nothing to deter poor teens from delivering out-of-wedlock babies. There is a clear need to move beyond statistical portrayals of adolescent mothers’ lives to examine the processes that support (or thwart) their successful transitions to young adulthood. More streamlined, targeted, and flexible solutions are needed to adjust to reductions in welfare spending, but cost-effective solutions must be informed by a clear understanding of the varied needs of adolescent mothers in the 1990s.

THE PATHWAYS TO ADULTHOOD FOR ADOLESCENT MOTHERS

Although only applying to girls in the last quarter of the 20th century, there is considerable consensus that the major developmental tasks of adolescence should involve gaining the means, through education or job experience, to become independent, both economically and in residence. We are accustomed to thinking that children and adolescents follow a linear path of incremental progress toward these outcomes in early adulthood.

Children’s physical development clearly follows an upward growth trajectory punctuated by periods of relative acceleration (e.g., in beginning to walk and talk or entering puberty). These changes monumentally affect the ways that children interact with, and are seen by, their families and community. We believe that children show a similar path in their mental, social, and emotional development as they become progressively more educated, more responsible, more independent, more mature, more able to solve problems, and, eventually, more independent of their parents. These changes are accelerated by societally timed events like entering kindergarten or graduating from high school, which progressively demand children’s increased interactions with widening social worlds. We argue that the diversity in the pathways to adulthood for young women reflects dramatic changes in normative views about women’s relationship to work, marriage, and children. Beliefs about what is natural or predictable about adolescents’ growth also carry with them societal hopes and, indeed, requirements for their social and economic progress.

However, events that disrupt this progression are seen as challenging or potentially derailing a child’s natural course of development. Bearing a child as a teenager is one such disruption. From a societal perspective, this event represents a decisive and negative turning point in an adolescent’s development—one that essentially renames teenage girls “teenage mothers,” thus abruptly and prematurely ending their adolescence. Yet, ironically, there is considerable stability in developmental transitions even as dramatic as this one. Rutter and Rutter (1993) cogently described the connection between discontinuity and continuity in development across the life span:

It is one thing to accept the crucial nature of the transformation and it is quite another to suppose that it has no connection with what has gone before and that it wipes clean the tape of past skills and experiences. (p. 68)

There is no doubt that having a baby as a teenager can be a critical transforming event, but this event alone neither erases the tape of past experiences nor determines future ones. The internal and external resources that determine all adolescents’ responses to the challenges and demands of early adult development (be they parenting, work, or college) build up over their lives. Statistical snapshots focusing on the birth of a child to a teenager can wipe clean past hardships and successes, as well as variations among the resources and abilities that minimize the effects of having a child at a young age.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE GROWN?

There is considerable ambivalence and debate about the developmental status of adolescent mothers and the standards against which adulthood should be assessed for these women. The majority of adolescent mothers are 18 years or older and, as such, are eligible for many of the privileges of adulthood. Nevertheless, researchers, programmers, and the public alike frequently refer to them as kids having kids (Maynard, 1997). However, policymakers insist that these children-come-mothers should be expected to finish high school and get jobs to support their offspring. Is a sexually experienced woman of 18 who has given birth to a child an adult? As one doctor told a young mother at the delivery of her child: “You are a woman now.” When is a woman still a child?

What growing up means for adolescent mothers reflects not only their personal goals, abilities, and talents, but also social prescriptions and opportunities for their adult behavior. In any society, being recognized as an adult is conditional on meeting certain culturally specific requirements, such as graduating from high school or college, demonstrating financial independence, or getting married. We might wonder how these adolescent mothers would define successful early adult transitions.

It has frequently been argued that in poor cultures with few opportunities for employment, becoming a mother may confer on young girls adult status and a modicum of respect that otherwise might not seem accessible. Although none of the women in the New York study of adolescent mothers described themselves as “children,” their responses when asked what it means to be a woman clearly suggest that adulthood is also more than motherhood for many of them. In her reply, one young mother clearly recognized the difference:

Young girls, where I live, they have kids. And they have the attitude, oh, you know, I’m grown now. I’ve got my own baby. Wake up! You’re not grown, you only have a child, you’re only a mother.… Grown people, quote unquote, have responsibilities such as paying their own rent, living in their own apartment, fending for their own selves, not depending on welfare. When you start doing those things for yourself, then you’re grown.¹

Many of the young mothers in the New York study agreed on these markers of adulthood. Financial independence and being able to support one’s children were central to feeling grown up, but so too was having an apartment—being in one’s own place. A working mother of two children described it this way: “In one sense I do [consider myself really a woman], but the only thing I think is holding me up right now from really putting myself as the title, as a woman, is me still being with my mother.”

One third of the mothers in the New York study were working mothers—store clerks, dental assistants, bank tellers, nurse’s aides, computer operators, janitors. We describe their ambitions and strategies for coping with the stresses of work and family. Like the stereotype, many mothers in the New York study (69%) were on welfare 6 years after delivery, but even these young women did not comprise a single group. Many of the mothers on welfare were able to use the financial help they received to advance their skills and education. For a few mothers, welfare dependence seemed their life plan. For others, it was a default position—a last resort in the face of serious illnesses, learning disabilities, or traumas.

CHAPTER OUTLINES AND PREVIEW OF KEY FINDINGS

This chapter outlines far-reaching changes in the historical and social contexts that have framed adolescent parenting as a social problem over the past half century. Current debates reflect long-standing disagreements about the nature of this problem. Is it a moral problem rising from the counterculture values of youth that began in the 1960s? Is it a medical problem related to inadequate knowledge about, or lack of access to, heath education, health care, or contraception? Is it rooted in poverty, joblessness, or educational disadvantage? How are changing roles for women and men implicated? In 1950, a majority of women in their early 20s were engaged in full-time childrearing; only 11% of women with children under age 6 were in the labor force; by 1994,this number was 61.7% (Children’s Defense Fund, 1995). Is teenage parenting a social problem fueled by increased demands for a more educated and skilled labor force? Is it a function of changing marriage patterns or a decline in marriageable men—especially in poor communities? Is teenage parenting a manifestation of intergenerational values passed from teenage mothers to their daughters?

We address each of these questions briefly in an effort to set the stage for understanding the historical and social context of this problem. We argue that the combined effects of increasing adolescent sexual activity, rising contraceptive use by teens, declining adolescent pregnancies, increasing demands for women to be educated and work, higher costs of childrearing, and declines in marriage and marriageable males create the context in which parenting has become clearly off-time for adolescent women in the 1990s. Indeed, in the current context, parenting as an adolescent can spuriously reflect both socially deviant and morally (or sexually) irresponsible individual choices. However, this view fuels the stereotype of adolescent mothers that undermines efforts to create real understanding of the problem in the 1990s and real solutions. Data from the New York study suggest that having a child as an adolescent is more than an individual choice—embedded as it is in this complex and changing social context.

Chapter 2 ends with a detailed description of the participants in the New York study—a 6-year study of inner-city, poor, minority group adolescent mothers and their children. They were aged 14 to 18 when their children were born and were recruited from a community-based health center where they brought their children for well baby care at least once in the first month of the children’ life. All came from Manhattan or Bronx counties—communities with extreme density, poverty, minority group concentration, unemployment, single-parent families, school dropout, and crime. The 1991 census data (Kids Count, New York State, 1994) indicate that 33% of children in New York City were living below the poverty line. Bronx county had the highest rate of any county: Half of the children were poor.

Chapter 3 discusses the concept of resilience as it informs our understanding of the within-group differences in adolescent mothers’transitions to early adulthood. Beyond identifying resilient individuals as the exceptional success story, we highlight the constellation of individual strengths as well as the contextual circumstances that allowed a majority of mothers in the New York study to successfully adapt to early adulthood at least in some domains of their lives. We begin with a qualitative review of the interview data of a group of 15 mothers who, by the 6-year follow-up, had graduated from high school, went on to college or work, and reported good physical and mental health (low levels of depressive symptoms). Themes identified in these young women’s descriptions of their experiences as inner-city teenage mothers demonstrate the interrelated processes of resilience that facilitated their adaptive transitions to early adulthood. These themes recur throughout this book as predictors of positive outcomes for the majority of the adolescent mothers, and their absence often marks the stories of mothers who do not enter early adulthood on an equal footing to their peers.

Using a quantitative approach to data analyses, chapter 4 reports on the predictors of school and employment outcomes for these adolescent mothers. By the 6-year follow-up, 52% of the New York sample of mothers had graduated from high school, 14% had some college, and 37% were employed full or part time. Better school and work outcomes depended largely on the mothers’pre-pregnancy school achievement, but within-group differences in depressive symptoms, repeat pregnancies, and stressful life events were found for mothers who (a) consistently attended school following the pregnancy and birth, (b) dropped out after the pregnancy or birth but subsequently returned to school, (c) dropped out after the pregnancy or birth and did not return, or (d) dropped out before the birth but did not return. These subgroups were highly stable over the 6 years of the New York study. About one third of the adolescent mothers were working by the 6-year follow-up. Surprisingly, compared nonworking mothers, working mothers were less likely to have lived with their own mothers at delivery. They also reported fewer depressive symptoms and stressful life events, although the stresses of work clearly emerge as salient for this group. Chapter 4 concludes with an analysis of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: TransitionS to Early Adulthood for Inner-City Adolescent Mothers: Building a Rock to Stand On
• 1 Beyond the Stereotypes: What Kind of Problem Is Teenage Parenting?
• 2 The American Context: Sex, Marriage, Work, and Poverty
• 3 Resilient Processes: Gaining Strength From Challenge and Support
• 4 Pathways to Adulthood: School and Work
• 5 Life as a Working Mother: Teressa and Charise
• 6 Welfare Benefits for Inner-City Adolescent Mothers: Supporting Early Adult Development
• 7 Living on Welfare: Mialisa, Helen, and Vivian
• 8 Resilient Relationships: Men as Fathers and Partners
• 9 Relationships That Hurt: Escaping Domestic Violence
• 10 Adolescent Mothers as Co-Parents: The Effects of Maternal Care, Grandmothers’ Involvement, and Day-Care Experiences on Child Competence and Problem Behaviors
• 11 Building a Rock to Stand On: Policies That Enhance Competence for the Transition to Early Adulthood
• Appendix A: Description of Measures
• Appendix B: Interview for Ethnographic Data
• Appendix C: Course Activity and Discussion Materials
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index