ABSTRACT This study investigated the needs of young children through the perspectives of their teen parents. A survey with 84 teen parents revealed that they prioritized finding high‐quality education programs and healthcare providers, understanding school readiness expectations and key developmental milestones, developing strong relationships, spending family time and having a strong support system of families and friends. When disaggregated by race, the descriptive statistics revealed different priorities of needs between Black teen parents and White teen parents. However, the differences were statistically significant in three out of 32 aspects, which might be partially due to the small sample sizes of the two groups. This study has implications for future research and policymaking, and the findings could inform the development and implementation of services and programs to support teen parents and their young children.
Fan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.