Cognitive readiness and adolescent parenting.

Hayes has written that about one million young women aged 15-19 become pregnant annually resulting in 500000 live births. The adverse long-term consequences associated with adolescent pregnancy include significant loss of education higher fertility rates the increased probability of single parenthood and increased dependence upon welfare assistance. Early parenthood also has critical implications for the children of young mothers who often suffer more developmental problems than children of older parents. The authors posit that due to their youth and relative inexperience adolescents knowledge of children and appropriate parenting practices is in general likely to be more limited than older mothers. Cognitive readiness for parenthood implies that mothers should be attitudinally predisposed to being a parent know how children develop and understand what constitutes appropriate parenting practices. Deficits in cognitive readiness among adolescents is thus hypothesized to predispose teen mothers to greater parenting stress as well as to less responsive parenting. The authors tested this hypothesis by comparing cognitive readiness for parenting in 171 pregnant adolescents 48 nonpregnant adolescents and 38 pregnant adults. They also assessed the relations between cognitive readiness and parenting stress and behavior to indeed find adolescents to be less cognitively prepared experiencing more stress in the parenting role and less adaptive in their parenting style than adult mothers. Relations between cognitive readiness and parenting stress and maternal interactional style were found. Additional analyses controlling for multiple demographic factors suggested that demographic variables played a role in explaining age-related differences in cognitive readiness as well as the relations between the readiness to parent and parenting behavior. Cognitive readiness however had unique and differential explanatory power in predicting parenting stress.