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Ready or Not: Predicting High and Low School Readiness Among Teen Parents’ Children

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Abstract

Past research has documented compromised development for teenage mothers’ children compared to others, but less is known about predictors of school readiness among these children or among teenage fathers’ children. Our multidimensional measures of high and low school readiness incorporated math, reading, and behavior scores and parent-reported health. Using parent interviews and direct assessments from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, we predicted high and low school readiness shortly before kindergarten among children born to a teenage mother and/or father (N ≈ 800). Factors from five structural and interpersonal domains based on the School Transition Model were measured at two time points, including change between those time points, to capture the dynamic nature of early childhood. Four domains (socioeconomic resources, maternal characteristics, parenting, and exposure to adults) predicted high or low school readiness, but often not both. Promising factors associated with both high and low readiness among teen parents’ children came from four domains: maternal education and gains in education (socioeconomic), maternal age of at least 18 and fewer depressive symptoms (maternal characteristics), socioemotional parenting quality and home environment improvements (parenting), and living with fewer children and receiving nonparental child care in infancy (exposure to adults). The findings preliminarily suggest policies that might improve school readiness: encouraging maternal education while supplying child care, focusing teen pregnancy prevention efforts on school-age girls, basic socioeconomic supports, and investments in mental health and high-quality home environments and parenting.

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Notes

  1. Some definitions of school readiness emphasize the readiness of the school to help children succeed and not just children’s readiness for school (e.g., Graue 1993), but like most researchers, we focus here on the child level.

  2. Because of ECLS-B confidentiality requirements, all Ns are rounded to the nearest 50. We compared eligible children with math scores, but who were listwise deleted for other non-response, to the analysis sample. Eligible children who were listwise deleted had mothers with 0.5 years lower education at Wave 1 than those in the analysis sample (p < .01), but they did not differ significantly by maternal age or household poverty.

  3. Ideally, our “ready” cutoff would have been at or above the mean in each of the three domains, but the small number of children of teen parents in this sample who met this more stringent cutoff did not permit extensive multivariate analysis.

  4. In supplementary bivariate analyses, children who stayed in poverty at both waves were more likely to be unready for school compared to children who were poor at just one wave or neither. In multivariate analyses including only controls and poverty measures, being poor at either Wave 1 or 3 was associated with lower odds of unreadiness compared to never being poor, but staying poor was not significant. After adding the other socioeconomic measures, a significant negative association between chronic poverty and unreadiness emerged compared to never being poor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Stefanie Mollborn

  2. University of Texas of the Permian Basin, Odessa, TX, 79762, USA

    Jeff A. Dennis

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  1. Stefanie Mollborn
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Correspondence to Stefanie Mollborn.

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This research is based on work supported by a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Public Health Service (#1 APRPA006015-01-00). The authors thank Professor Richard Jessor and Casey Blalock for their contributions to this project. Direct correspondence to Stefanie Mollborn, Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Science, 483 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309–0483. E-mail: mollborn@colorado.edu.

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Mollborn, S., Dennis, J.A. Ready or Not: Predicting High and Low School Readiness Among Teen Parents’ Children. Child Ind Res 5, 253–279 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-011-9126-2

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