Contact Name
Barbara Dietsch
562-985-9488

Contact Email
bdietsc@WestEd.org

By Jennifer Manlove, Ph.D.
Child Trends

An unsafe school environment emerged as a key factor associated with the likelihood of a nonmarital teen birth in a recent study. The study followed female students for four years starting in eighth grade and found that students attending schools where violence, drug use and crime are problems had a greater likelihood of becoming teen mothers before they completed high school.

While numerous studies have examined the causes of adolescent motherhood, little research exists on school-level influences on nonmarital motherhood. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, this study examines the influence of family, individual, and school characteristics on the likelihood that a girl will become a teen mother. Out of a nationally representative sample of eighth graders, a total of 8% had a nonmarital birth within four years of eighth grade, including 5% of white teens and 22% of African American teens.

School-level Influences

The findings indicate that white students who reported that school violence and substance abuse were high were at a greater risk of having a child in their teens. The students reported about the degree to which the following were felt to be a problem in their schools:

• physical conflict among students,
  
• robbery or theft,
  
• vandalism of school property,
  
• student use of alcohol or illegal drugs,
  
• student possession of weapons, and
  
• physical or verbal abuse of teachers.

The study also found that African American students in schools where teachers reported a safer environment had a lower chance of having a child during their high school years. The teachers reported similar measures as the students; however, analyses indicated that only those schools rated by teachers as very safe were distinct. Note that only 16% of black students attended schools that teachers reported as being very safe (compared with 25% of white students). These measures of school safety and crime had an influence on student outcomes, even after controlling for family background, individual performance, and other school characteristics.

Participation in a sex education class once a week or more in eighth grade was associated with a higher risk of adolescent motherhood for black students only. As found in another Child Trends study, this may reflect a tendency to focus sex education classes on already high-risk populations. One fifth of black students attended sex education this frequently in eighth grade.

No other school-level measure-including the percentage of students receiving free lunch in the school, the racial/ethnic composition of the school, and the percentage of students in single-parent families-was significant, after controlling for family and individual measures of performance.

In addition, measures of school context did not appear to erase the effects of family and individual-level influences. Recent studies suggest that individual and family-level measures were stronger predictors of adolescent behavior than were community-level measures.

Student Engagement and Performance

Measures of student performance and engagement in school in the eighth grade were also associated with the risk of a high school age nonmarital birth. High academic performance, including high achievement test scores and self-reported grades, was associated with a reduced risk of a nonmarital birth. Girls with high educational expectations were less likely to become teen mothers. Specifically, black teens who expected to graduate from college and white teens who expected to attend graduate school were less likely to have a teen birth than those with lower educational expectations.

Students involved in school clubs were also less likely to have a child during their high school years. Specifically, leadership in school clubs among black students (about 20% of students) and involvement in school-based religious organizations by white students (18%) were found to be linked to a lower risk of school-age motherhood.

Girls who had been held back a grade before eighth grade (approximately 30% of the sample) were twice as likely to have a nonmarital birth as girls who had not been held back. In addition, a measure of turbulence indicated that teens who had changed schools four or more times between first and eighth grade (excluding grade-promotion school changes) were twice as likely to have a birth by twelfth grade. Between 10 and 11% of students in the sample had changed schools this many times by eighth grade.

Family Influences

Both black and white teens who lived in an intact family with both biological parents in the eighth grade had a reduced risk of a nonmarital birth during their school years. While 71% of white teens lived in an intact family, only 40% of black teens did. In addition, white teens in families with higher income levels had a reduced risk of a nonmarital teen birth.

Conclusion

Family, individual, and school context characteristics measured in the eighth grade were associated with the risk of a nonmarital birth before completing high school. If there is any single theme that crosses the varied findings from this study, it is that those young women least prepared for motherhood are at the greatest risk of a high school age nonmarital birth. School and family strategies to help adolescents to feel safe in school, to become engaged in schoolwork and school activities and to be successful in academic pursuits need to be considered as a promising direction for affecting adolescent fertility.

This article was based on "Nonmarital School-Age Motherhood: Family, Individual, and School Characteristics" published in the October 1998 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research.