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Prevalence and Risk Factors for Early Motherhood Among Low-Income, Maltreated, and Foster Youth

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Demography

Abstract

Early childbearing is associated with a host of educational and economic disruptions for teenage girls and increased risk of adverse outcomes for their children. Low-income, maltreated, and foster youth have a higher risk of teen motherhood than the general population of youth. In this study, we assessed differences in the risk of early motherhood among these groups and investigated whether differences likely reflect selection factors versus effects of involvement with Child Protective Services (CPS) or foster care. Using a statewide linked administrative data system for Wisconsin, we employed survival analysis to estimate the hazard of early birth (child conceived prior to age 18) among females. We found that both the youth involved in CPS and youth in foster care were at significantly higher risk of early motherhood than low-income youth, and these differences were not explained by a range of sociodemographic and family composition characteristics. Moreover, our findings indicate that CPS and foster care are unlikely to be causal agents in the risk of early motherhood: among foster youth, risk was lower during foster care compared with before; among CPS-involved girls, risk was the same or lower after CPS investigation compared with before. Subsequent analysis showed that after girls exited foster care, those who were reunified with their birth families were at higher risk than those placed in adoption or guardianship. Overall, our findings suggest that whereas CPS and foster youth are high-risk populations for early motherhood, CPS involvement and foster care placement do not exacerbate, and may instead reduce, risk.

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Notes

  1. Although the majority of teen births are unplanned, an estimated 23 % of births to women ages 15 to 19 were intended at conception (Mosher et al. 2012).

  2. The vast majority of girls dropped because of this exclusion were from the SNAP sample (1,868 excluded) and CPS sample (1,951 excluded): only 165 girls were dropped from the foster care sample. The proportion with an early birth was higher in the excluded SNAP group than the included SNAP group (11.3 % vs. 9.1 %), but lower in the excluded CPS and foster care groups (8.5 % and 12.7 %) than the included CPS and foster care groups (17.1 % and 23.2 %). We reestimated our models (with only sociodemographic controls) to include girls who could not be linked to their birth parents; results were substantively similar to those presented here.

  3. For example, recent analysis for 33 states and the District of Columbia (not including Wisconsin) showed a monotonic negative relationship between age and percentage of births covered by Medicaid: 76 % of births to those under 20, 66.4 % for those 20–24, and 41.1 % of those 25–29 in 2010 (Curtin et al. 2013). A Delaware study found Medicaid coverage for 81 % of births to those 17 and younger and 78 % of births to those 18–19, compared with only 36 % of births to those 25–34, were covered by Medicaid (Maiden et al. 2014).

  4. Doyle (2007) found a large local average treatment effect of foster care on greater risk of motherhood before age 20. We found that the risk of early motherhood is lower during care compared with before or after care and that risk is slightly lower after care than before. Results from Doyle’s study and ours are not directly comparable; Doyle focused only on a binary measure of foster care and measured the time of birth rather than the time of conception, and therefore could not distinguish births conceived prior to entering foster care from those during or after care. As recent work has shown, many teen births occurring among girls experiencing foster care were conceived prior to entry (King et al. 2014).

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1 R21 HD091459-01) with support from the Population Research Institute at Penn State University (P2CHD041025) and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. We thank the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, Department of Health Services, Department of Corrections, Department of Public Instruction, and Department of Workforce Development for consultation and the use of data, but acknowledge that these agencies do not certify the accuracy of the analyses presented.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Criminology and the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network, Pennsylvania State University, 505 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Sarah A. Font

  2. Schools of Public Affairs and Social Work, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Maria Cancian

  3. School of Social Work, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Maria Cancian & Lawrence M. Berger

  4. School of Social Work, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1350 University Avenue, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Lawrence M. Berger

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Font, S.A., Cancian, M. & Berger, L.M. Prevalence and Risk Factors for Early Motherhood Among Low-Income, Maltreated, and Foster Youth. Demography 56, 261–284 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0744-x

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