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Teen Moms Face Difficulty

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The Associated Press

Published: October 24, 2008

NEW YORK - Teen motherhood has gained a bit of celebrity allure with the pregnancies of Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, but front-line professionals see a starkly different reality involving poverty, lost opportunities and a cost to taxpayers in the billions of dollars annually.

To the panelists at a forum Thursday organized by the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children, the hoopla over Spears and Palin represents a squandered opportunity for a serious national discussion of teen motherhood.

"We are, as a society, uncomfortable with sitting down and having conversations about what we expect," said Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "When is the last time we said, as a culture, 'Babies need adult parents.'"

"Teen births do have substantial, widespread negative effects, especially for the children of teen mothers," said economist Saul Hoffman of the University of Delaware. "The children are more likely to be in foster care, less likely to graduate from high school. The daughters are more likely to have teen births themselves, the sons are more likely to be incarcerated."

During the past year, the real teen mothers in the spotlight and those in fictional portrayals such as the movie "Juno" come from supportive, financially stable families, and seem to be on track to have an array of future opportunities that a more typical teen mom might lack.

Less than 40 percent of the mothers who have their first child before age 18 earn a high school diploma, Hoffman said. Federal statistics found the teen birth rate increased 3 percent between 2005 and 2006.

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