Teenage parents

Britain, notoriously, has a higher rate of teenage pregnancies than the rest of Europe. But so what? This new paper by Marco Francesconi estimates the damage done by being born to a young mum.
He compares the children of teenage mums to their younger siblings, born when their mum was over 20. This controls for the possibility that teenage mums have "bad genes" (impatience, lack of self-control) that might jeopardize their children's chances of success in life.
He estimates that, even controlling for this, the children of teenage mums are 12.7 percentage points less likely to get an A level, 5.2 percentage points more likely to be economically inactive, and 2.7 percentage points less likely to be in the richest 10% of earners.
But what's the mechanism? There are (at least) two possibilities. One is that teenage mums are likely to be poorer. The other is that they are more likely to have unstable homes. Either, in theory, is bad for their kids. Here, Marco's findings will delight conservatives:

An important channel through which the adverse effects of having a teen mother are transmitted to children's later outcomes is childhood family structure...Growing up in a non-intact family not only has detrimental consequences on its own, but also magnifies the negative effect of having a teen mother on several young adults' behaviours...the interaction between childhood family poverty and teenage childbearing does not seem to have a strong additional influence on child outcomes.

However, it's not just being a teen mum that's bad for kids. Marco shows that kids born to under-24s get less educated, and are more likely to be economically inactive, than those born to over-31s.

Comments

[Mark Wadsworth]

Is anybody supposed to be surprised by this?

[Bob B]

Obviously, with the new ascendancy of the "sociocentric" paradigm and concerns about social justice, there's an overwhelming case for positive discrimination favouring the children of teenage mums to compensate for their numerous disadvantages.

I feel confident that it will only be the econocentric paradigm obsessives who mention weird notions like perverse incentives, moral hazard, adverse selection and other games theory nonsense.

[dsquared]

[He compares the children of teenage mums to their younger siblings, born when their mum was over 20. This controls for the possibility that teenage mums have "bad genes" (impatience, lack of self-control) that might jeopardize their children's chances of success in life]

ooooh, birth order effects! I can't understand why researchers are still pretending that comparisons between older and younger siblings are really good controls because "they're in the same family"; it's been a known problem for years now.

[chris]

D2 - birth order effects should mean these estimates are downwardly biased estimates of the effect of teen parenthood, because it's usually thought that older siblings do better than younger ones.
And the paper gives three other estimation methods, most of which tell a similar story.

[dsquared]

ahh yes good point, I was extrapolating mistakenly from my own family where both my younger siblings are cleverer than me.

[dearieme]

I read somewhere that most purported "birth order effects" vanish if, instead of categorising an only child as first-born, you characterise him as last-born.

[Bob B]

Interesting. I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that only-children tended to have distictive behaviour patterns as compared with either first- or last-born.

The behavioural consequences of sibling position was a research interest of a subject tutor from that distant age when I was a student at uni. On one occasion, drinking in the bar with a large group from one of his lecture classes, he looked round the group and gave his instant estimate of the sibling position of each - accurately for the most part, as I recall, but I can't now find any of his papers on the web.

His other main claim to fame was that at Cambridge in the 1930s, he had been a close friend of Guy Burgess - I joke not: some biographical accounts of Burgess and the Cambridge spies mention him. Perhaps what had interested Burgess was his genuine proletarian origins. Certainly, any Marxist tendencies had been abandoned long since and by the time of my acquaintance he was a devout follower of TH Green and Bosanquet. I've a special reason to remember him still because he reported me to faculty for lack of diligence - my main subject prof mentioned this to me and also that it wasn't taken seriously.

[dearieme]

Was that Bosanquet the googly bowler or Bosanquet the student of diffusion in porous solids? Or the news reader?

[Bob B]

None of those Bosanquets.

"Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923), British philosopher, political theorist and social reformer, was one of the principal exponents (with F.H. Bradley) of late nineteenth and early twentieth century `Absolute Idealism.'"
http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/archives/fall1997/entries/bosanquet/

Apparently, TH Green described him as "the most gifted man of his generation."

Not too many folks have heard of Bernard Bosanquet nowadays but then he was probably the very last of the once prominent British Hegelians and Idealists who got swept aside by the incoming tide of new, analytical philosophy started by GE Moore and Russell. My tutor regarded regarded all analytical philosophy in political and social theory as unmitigated bunkum so we never got officially acquainted with any of it.

[emmanuelgoldstein]

[Not too many folks have heard of Bernard Bosanquet nowadays but then he was probably the very last of the once prominent British Hegelians and Idealists who got swept aside by the incoming tide of new, analytical philosophy started by GE Moore and Russell.]

Superseded, and rightly so. Just say no to idealism!

[Bob B]

Hi EG - a long time:

Of course, those distant undergrad times of mine were pre-Rawlsian, with the rehabilitation of political theory that followed, but I took against what I felt was the inherently prescriptive and authoritarian bent of the Hegelians and Idealists. Unlike them, I felt and still do feel comfortable with JS Mill's working distinction between self- and other-regarding actions:

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." JS Mill: On Liberty

It was fascinating to observe a few years back in 2003 a serious attempt then to re-establish the influence of TH Green when Matt Carter was appointed general secretary of the Labour Party on promotion from the post of regional organiser. In the New Statesman review by Lord Hattersley of Carter's book on TH Green, we have: "Earlier this year [2003] Matt Carter (who gave up philosophy to become a Labour Party organiser!) wrote T H Green and the Development of Ethical Socialism for Imprint Academic. Green's rehabilitation is long overdue."
http://www.newstatesman.com/200312010041

Evidently, an epitaph for the influence of Hegel and Idealism in Britain is entirely premature. Intriguingly, Matt Carter is no longer General Secretary of the Labour Party:

"Prior to his appointment [as MD of the London office of Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates] Matt was general secretary of the Labour party, the youngest ever person to hold the post. In that role, he was responsible for organising the delivery of Labour’s successful 2005 general election campaign. Matt worked for the Labour party for eight years, including on the 2001 campaign as regional director for the south-west."
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matt_carter/profile.html

[Edd]

This study seems to show more that being brought up in an unstable family or in relative poverty have a negative effect upon a childs chances of success. This is something that has been documented numerous time. Being born of a teenage mum per-se may have little or no effect beyond the circumstances that breed teenage pregnancies. It would be more interesting if the study had looked at what seperates teenage mothers from other mothers in the same socio-economic groups and if the control group had been children with similar backgrounds to start with.

[Terri]

This reminds me of some research about 30 years ago, when the target of the day was teenage marriages. They had a higher-than-average rate of breakdown and it was generally thought that this was attributable to immaturity.

The research found that teenage couples were (a)more likely to be in low-paid employment or unemployed (b)living in substandard accommodation (c)have little or no family support, or downright hostility from parents.

When the research was controlled for those factors, it was found that teenage marriages were not inherently unstable. Couples in their 20s and 30s were just as likely to break up when faced with similar circumstances. I wish I could remember the details - I think it was published for the then Marriage Guidance Council. If anyone does know about it, I'd be grateful for the name of that study.

I do get irritated by the use of 'teenage pregnancy' rather than 'unwanted teenage pregnancy'. It's an attempt to impose a (relatively new) cultural norm. By no means all people in their teens who have babies do so unintentionally, nor do they fit neatly into the popular stereotype. Only a couple of decades ago, popular concern centred on whether women in their mid-30s were too old to have children.

[Bob B]

OK. But the crunch issue is that Britain does indeed have a high rate of teen pregnancies compared with other European countries. Presumably, that contributes to the incidence of child poverty in Britain so we need to decide what impact, if any, the differentially high rate of teen pregnancies should have on public policy.

I don't know whether it is generally true but it is certainly often claimed that many councils, providing rented social housing, grant priority in making housing allocations to teen and single mothers thereby creating a direct incentive to create single-parent families and thereby adding to the incidence of child poverty.

More than 30 years ago, for a few years, I was an elected member of a city council (which will be familiar to Chris). The council at the time - and possibly since - had a very strict policy in making housing allocations.

The policy was a queuing system on a first-come, first-served basis except for extraordinary medical circumstances which had to be fairly dire - I know that to be true as I was a member of the relevant sub-committee. Otherwise, it mattered not whether the applicant for rented housing had five children or none or was married or not, they were obliged to join the back of the queue.

This policy had bipartisan support in the council and was not politically contentious in local elections. Part of the rationale was that the policy, besides reducing the incentive for single-parenting, also reduced opportunities for corruption which had been known to occur in some (neighbouring) councils that operated a points system for granting priority access to housing on the basis of assessed need.