Family Support: Helping Teenage Mothers to Cope

Families often provide varied forms of assistance to adolescents coping with pregnancy. A 1966-67 survey under the auspices of Sinai Hospital Baltimore evaluating the effectiveness of a service program for teenage mothers obtained data from 404 pregnant adolescents under 18 and 350 prospective grandmothers. The sample was largely lower class and black. 95% of the adolescents were reinterviewed 1 and 3 years later and 82% 5 years later. A control group of classmates who did not get pregnant as teenagers were also interviewed at the 3- and 5-year follow-ups. The survey was not originally designed to study family support and therefore the early data especially is incomplete. The study found that the pregnant teenagers held conventional attitudes toward family formation even though most of them got pregnant before marriage. Marriage rates went from 15% to 33% with an additional 16% married and divorced. However even married adolescents often remained in parents homes and many who moved out were living alone. The rate of movement away from the parental household was greater among pregnant adolescents than among their nonpregnant classmates but neither childbirth nor marriage invariably meant departure from the parental home. Family support both material and psychological was more available to the adolescent who remained at home. Variations in residential patterns were correlated to factors of age race desire to remain in school dependence on parents parental attitudes family history of out-of-wedlock childbearing female-headed families additional childbearing and availability of physical space. The study found that family assistance promoted the later economic prospects of unmarried mothers but had less effect on those who married even if they subsequently divorced. There was no correlation between residential careers and childrearing patterns. The article concludes that there is usually no alienation between parents and pregnant adolescents and that public programs should build on existing patterns of family support always taking into consideration that these patterns are not designed to promote strong conjugal ties or provide a permanent family arrangement for the adolescent mother and her child.