Teenage Mother's Health across Different Life Stages

Guyonne Kalb and Ha Vu

No 14046, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Many women who give birth during their teenage years face lifetime disadvantages in health, social and economic domains. To develop effective policies to support these teenage mothers, it is important to understand how the disadvantage evolves over time to target the timing of any interventions. This paper focuses on health outcomes and seeks to determine the role of teenage motherhood and the likely channels through which teenage motherhood may contribute to health disparities across different life stages between teenage mothers and other women. Using household panel survey data and fixed-effects regressions that control for the effects of prior disadvantage, we show that teenage motherhood is negatively associated with all domains of health and that impacts worsen in later life stages. Potential mediators, including health behaviours, family, social support, education and economic factors are investigated and these partly explain mental health outcomes, reducing the direct impact of teenage motherhood, but not physical health. The strongest pathways are through social support, family and economic outcomes. Our results suggest boosting social support and addressing economic disadvantage may improve mental health outcomes for teenage mothers.

Keywords: physical health; mental health; teenage motherhood; longitudinal analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 I31 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2021-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Economic Record, 2022, 98 (321), 191-213.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14046.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Teenage Mothers’ Health across Different Life Stages (2022)
Working Paper: Teenage mothers' health across different life stages (2021)
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:iza:izadps:dp14046

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().