Abstract
Teenage mothers typically have lower educational attainment than other women. Most observers have argued that this is a major reason for their greater risk of poverty. This article takes the opposite view: that circumstances associated with poverty contribute to a greater likelihood of teenage childbearing. In particular, poor educational quality and the chances of secondary sector employment are more common for black women, regardless of their age at first birth. Hence the payoffs to education may be quite low for these women, which may be the reason for early motherhood. This argument is presented in terms of segmented labor market theory. Data to support it is presented from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Other common explanations of teenage motherhood are critiqued.
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Notes
Birth rates for the youngest adolescent women remain small for both blacks and whites: the black birth rate for 10 to 14-year-old girls varied between 4.1 and 5.2 births per 1,000 from 1970 to 1986, and the white birth rate for this group has remained at 0.5 or 0.6. National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Advance Report of Final Natality Statistics,”Monthly Vital Statistics Report 37:3 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988.)
Elise F. Jones, Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, Noreen Goldman, Stanley K. Henshaw, Richard Lincoln, Jeannie I. Rosoff, Charles F. Westoff, and Deirdre Wulf, “Teenage Pregnancy in Developed Countries: Determinants and Policy Implications, “FamilyPlanning Perspectives, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1985), pp. 53–63.
Sandra L. Hofferth and Kristin A. Moore, “Early Childbearing and Later Economic Weil-Being,”American Sociological Review, Vol. 44 (1979), pp. 784–815.
This point is suggested by Marian Wright Edelman,Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987).
David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich,Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
The “correspondence principle” maintains that schools prepare young people for different positions in the labor hierarchy. Hence, people who are likely to be in secondary jobs are also likely to receive low-quality education, and the reciprocal effects of poor schooling and poor jobs are difficult to separate. Samuel Bowles, and Herbert Gintis,Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
I use a classification scheme developed by David M. Gordon, “Procedure for Allocating Jobs into Labor Segments,” Mimeo (New York: New School for Social Research, 1986).
The conventional approach is due in large part to the continuing influence of the deviancy school of sociology, and to the national preoccupation with welfare expenditures on single mothers. However, the evidence on the supposed benefits of marriage is not unambiguous. In Furstenberg’s study, the teenage mothers who married the latest did best in finishing high school, and the ones who married earliest did worst. Similarly, Moore,et. al. found that teenage marriage also substantially reduced educational attainment, controlling for other relevant influences. Hence a young married mother may be less “deviant,” but not necessarily better off economically than an unmarried mother. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr.,Unplanned Parenthood: The Social Consequences of Teenage Childbearing (New York: The Free Press, 1976). Kristin A. Moore, Sandra L. Hofferth, Richard F. Wertheimer, Linda J. Waite, and Steven B. Caldwell, “Teenage Childbearing: Consequences for Women, Families and Government Welfare Expenditures,” in Keith G. Scott, Tiffany Field, and Euan G. Robertson, eds.,Teenage Parents and their Offspring (New York: Grune & Stratton 1981).
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” in Lee Rainwater, and William L. Yancey, eds.,The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), p. 47.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan,Family and Nation (1986). Michael Novak,et al., The New Consensus on Family and Welfare (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1987). Mickey Kaus, “The Work Ethic State,”The New Republic (July 7, 1986), pp. 22-23. Nicholas Lemann, “The Origins of the Underclass,”The Atlantic Monthly, (June 1986) pp. 31-55 and (July 1986) pp. 54-68. Ken Auletta,The Underclass (New York: Random House, 1982).
However, contemporary culture of poverty theory is in this respect much different from Oscar Lewis’s classic account. Oscar Lewis,La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Random House, 1966).
William A. Darity and Rhonda M. Williams, “Peddlers Forever? Culture, Competition, and Discrimination,”American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 75 (1985), pp. 256–261.
Lemann, “Origins of the Underclass,” p. 41.
Charles Murray,Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1960–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
Kristin A. Moore and Martha R. Burt,Private Crisis, Public Cost: Policy Perspectives on Teenage Childbearing (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press 1982). Harriet B. Presser and Linda S. Salsberg, “Public Assistance and Early Family Formation: Is There a Pronatalist Effect?”Social Problems 23 (December 1975). David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane, “The Impact of AFDC on Family Structure and Living Arrangements, “Researchin Labor Economics, Vol. 7, (1985) pp. 137-207. Nan L. Maxwell, “Influences on the Timing of First Childbearing,”Contemporary Policy Issues Vol. 5, No. 2, (1987) pp. 113-121. Robert D. Plotnick, “Determinants of Teenage Outof-Wedlock Childbearing: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth,” mimeo (Seattle: University of Washington, 1988).
William Julius Wilson,The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). M. B. Tucker, “The Black Male Shortage in Los Angeles,”Sociology and Social Research Vol. 71 (1987) pp. 221-227.
U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,Marital Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), p. 53.
Farida Shah, Melvin Zelnik, and John F. Kantner, “Unprotected Intercourse Among Unwed Teenagers,”Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 7 (January/February 1975), pp. 39–44. See also Allan F. Abrahamse, Peter A. Morrison, and Linda J. Waite,Beyond Stereotypes: Who Becomes a Single Teenage Mother? (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1988). These reports probably underestimate the extent of desired teenage pregnancy, since so much stigma is associated with “illegitimacy.” While the source of the stigma is mainly outside the poor black community, teenagers may still feel some pressure to express the values of the dominant society when talking to an interviewer from outside their own community.
Nan L. Maxwell and Frank L. Mott, “Trends in the Determinants of Early Child-bearing,” mimeo (Columbus, Ohio: Center for Human Resource Research).
Richard Edwards,Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979). William T. Dickens and Kevin Lang, “A Test of Dual Labor Market Theory”,American Economic Review, Vol. 75 (1985), pp. 792-804. Paul Osterman, “An Empirical Study of Labor Market Segmentation,”Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 28, No. 4 (1975), pp. 508-523.
Russell W. Rumberger and Martin Carnoy, “Segmentation in the U.S. Labor Market: Its Effects on the Mobility and Earnings of Whites and Blacks,”Cambridge Journal of Economics Vol 4. (1980), pp. 117–132.
Darity and Williams,Peddlers Forever. Rhonda M. Williams, “Capital, Competition, and Discrimination: A Reconsideration of Racial Earnings Inequality,”Review of Radical Political Economics Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 1-15. Steven Shulman, “Racial Inequality and White Employment: An Interpretation and Test of the Bargainig Power Hypothesis,”Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Winter 1990).
Marc Kitchel, “The Secondary Labor Market and Local Labor Markets,” Mimeo (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1988).
Leon Dash,When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis of Teenage Child-bearing (New York: William Morrow, 1989).
Bowles and Gintis,Schooling in Capitalist America, pp. 132-133.
There is very persuasive discussion of the formation of expectations among innercity young women in David Ellwood,Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (New York: Basic Books, 1988), pp. 211–215.
All results are derived using the sample weights supplied by the Center for Human Resource Research, the home of the NLSY. (These weights adjust mostly for the oversampling of black and economically disadvantaged white youths, and for sample attrition.) The results reported here are for non-Hispanic blacks and non-Hispanic/nonblacks (predominantly white, although other ethnic groups were difficult to identify).
Carol B. Stack,All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Joyce A. Ladner,Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971).
Gordon, Edwards, and Reich,Segmented Work.
U.S. Employment Service,Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 3rd edition, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965). Gerry Oster, “A Factor Analytic Test of the Theory of the Dual Economy,”Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 61, No. 1 (1979), pp. 33-39. For more details on this classification method, see Gordon (1986), and Kitchel (1987).
Because there is so much employment change among young people and because the youngest workers are the most likely to be in secondary jobs, I also examined the distribution of women workers aged 25–29 only (not shown). There was no significant difference in the results.
Wall Street Journal, “For Poor Teenagers, Pregnancies Become New Rite of Passage” (March 17, 1988), p. 1.
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McCrate, E. Labor market segmentation and relative black/white teenage birth rates. Rev Black Polit Econ 18, 37–53 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02901189
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02901189