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Family Resources in Two Generations and School Readiness Among Children of Teen Parents

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Abstract

Overall, children born to teen parents experience disadvantaged cognitive achievement at school entry compared with children born to older parents. However, within this population, there is variation, with a significant fraction of teen parents’ children acquiring adequate preparation for school entry during early childhood. We ask whether the family background of teen parents explains this variation. We use data on children born to teen mothers from three waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (N ~ 700) to study the association of family background with children’s standardized reading and mathematics achievement scores at kindergarten entry. When neither maternal grandparent has completed high school, children’s scores on standardized assessments of math and reading achievement are one-quarter to one-third of a standard deviation lower compared with families where at least one grandparent finished high school. This association is net of teen mothers’ own socioeconomic status in the year prior to children’s school entry.

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Notes

  1. The ECLS-B restricted data license requires users to report Ns to the nearest 50.

  2. For confidentiality reasons, the sampling frame for the ECLS-B was constrained to include births occurring to mothers who were at least 15 years old.

  3. The mi command in Stata version 11 was used to create 20 imputed datasets (Allison 2002; StataCorp. 2009).

  4. Sample sizes listed represent the original sample (rounded to the nearest 50) prior to multiple imputation. Multiple imputation added about 50 additional cases which are represented in the reported means and models and in our report of the overall sample size.

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Acknowledgments

This research is based on work supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 1061058). Research funds were also provided by the NIH/NICHD funded CU Population Center (R24HD066613). We thank Elizabeth Lawrence for her contributions to this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Survey Research Center and Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson St., Ann Arbor, MI, 48104, USA

    Paula Fomby

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder, UCB 327, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    Laurie James-Hawkins

  3. Department of Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, UCB 483, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    Stefanie Mollborn

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  1. Paula Fomby
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Correspondence to Paula Fomby.

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Fomby, P., James-Hawkins, L. & Mollborn, S. Family Resources in Two Generations and School Readiness Among Children of Teen Parents. Popul Res Policy Rev 34, 733–759 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-015-9363-z

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