Reconsidering Teenage Pregnancy and Parenthood

Frank Furstenberg
Additional contact information
Frank Furstenberg: Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

Societies, 2016, vol. 6, issue 4, 1-8

Abstract: This paper looks back at the findings reported in Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teenage Parenthood , a decade after its publication in light of recent research. Increasingly, the most methodologically sophisticated research has minimized the “causal impact” of early childbearing on later life events consistent with the findings of the Baltimore Study. I argue in the paper that we must see early childbearing primarily as a marker rather than a cause of economic disadvantage. As such, reducing early childbearing will have a minimal impact on the lives of highly disadvantaged teens unless those teens use the delay in childbearing to improve their education and labor market prospects.

Keywords: causes of teenage childbearing; teenage contraceptive use; consequences of teenage childbearing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/6/4/33/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/6/4/33/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:6:y:2016:i:4:p:33-:d:81859

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

More articles in Societies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().