Effects of teen parenting on child health among low-income families in New York City

Problem Significance

Child-bearing during adolescence has long been considered a serious public health concern with well-documented negative consequences for adolescent mothers and their children. Most earlier work has focused on the mother-child interaction for teen parenting and on birth outcomes, cognitive development or behavioral problems as child health outcomes exclusively. This study incorporates discipline and health behaviors regarding the child and focuses on the physical and psychosocial health outcomes of toddlers and pre-schoolers.

Methods

Study Design/Participants: 162 predominantly African-American and Latino adolescent mother-child dyads from low-income families were interviewed by bi-lingual, ethnically similar, trained interviewers in waiting rooms of pediatric facilities (federally-funded and department of health clinics) in four counties of New York City.

Measures: Interview questions focused on parenting behaviors of the teen mother (discipline techniques, provision of a healthy diet, use of child safety precautions, such as locking up household poisons) and measures of physical and psychosocial health and development of the child. Many interview questions were drawn from previously used surveys including national surveys.

Results/Conclusion

The study found that: discipline techniques used by the mother impacted the child's physical and psychosocial health (positively for praise and negatively for punishment); a healthy diet was related to better overall health and fewer developmental delays (motor, language); and taking more child safety precautions was related to better psychosocial health of the child. This study highlights the importance of assessing teen parenting and child health outcomes more broadly than has been done by most studies in the past.