Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing

2. From Teenage Mother to Midlife Matriarch

24 Chapter 2 From Teenage Mother to Midlife Matriarch WHEN ARTHUR CAMPBELL (1968) wrote his scenario of the life course of teenage mothers in 1968, quoted in the previous chapter, only scant evidence existed on the social and economic consequences of teenage childbearing. Campbell was largely surmising the adverse effects of having a child early in life based on cross-sectional comparisons of women whose first birth occurred in their teens with women who had children later in life. If few studies existed at the time on the short-term effects of early childbearing, even less information was available about the long-term consequences of teenage parenthood for the parents or their offspring. Yet his conclusion that 90 percent of a woman’s life script was written when she became a mother at age sixteen or so seemed entirely plausible, if not compelling. THE BALTIMORE STUDY When I first read Campbell’s statement, I had just completed collecting the first wave of interview data from a sample of nearly four hundred young mothers residing in Baltimore who had participated in a random assignment evaluation of one of the nation’s first comprehensive care programs for adolescent mothers (Furstenberg, Masnick, and Ricketts 1972). As I have recounted in greater detail elsewhere (Furstenberg 2002a), the study began almost by accident when I was in the midst of my graduate training at Columbia. My mother, a social worker in an experimental program intended to reduce unplanned births among teenagers, recruited me to help design an evaluation. Though I resisted at first, my mother exercised her parental prerogatives and insisted that I help out. And so I did, of course unaware that I was embarking on a research project that would extend over my entire academic career and not be completed, strictly speaking, until more than forty years later. The Baltimore sample consisted of just the sort of young women whose lives might unfold as Campbell predicted. All pregnant for the first time before the age of eighteen, the teens who delivered babies at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore in the mid-1960s had grown up in relatively precarious circumstances and appeared to have bleak prospects for their later lives. At the time of conception, half were sixteen or younger, three-quarters had not yet completed the tenth grade, and three-quarters had no immediate plans to wed before their first child was born. As much as I was able to detect from local vital statistics records, the young women in the study were reasonably representative of teenage mothers who gave birth in Baltimore City, and more broadly of young mothers from urban areas who delivered their first child in the mid-1960s. As I note later, the careers of these women and their children appear to be remarkably similar to those of several national samples of teenage parents who have been tracked in larger studies. Thus, the story of the Baltimore mothers closely resembles the findings that would have been obtained had I followed any other urban sample of lowincome teen mothers. I describe the members of this sample as “low-income” because all participants came from poor and working-class families who were eligible for medical assistance in 1965 when the study was launched. Thus, the sample excludes women from more affluent families, many of whom would have married or given up their children for adoption. Four out of five of the women were black; according to vital statistics, their racial composition closely resembled that of women whose first birth occurred before age eighteen in Baltimore City (for a more detailed description of the origins of the study, see Furstenberg 1976). Some of the women came from desperately poor sections of the city that resembled urban ghettos today, though the conditions faced by these women and their families were probably somewhat less harsh than those that now prevail, if only because neighborhoods were less economically segregated, especially for blacks, than they have become in the intervening decades. One-quarter Teenage Mother to Midlife Matriarch 25 of the sample came from families on public assistance at the time the pregnancy occurred. Half had grown up in a single-parent family, indicating high levels of disadvantage by standards of the period, but the majority grew up in a family headed by one or two working parents. Nonetheless, the families who participated in the program were burdened by large numbers of children (six on...