A new study has revealed that the mother's education plays an important role in her child's academic success.
According to Sandra Tang , the study's lead author from the University of Michigan, children of mothers 19 and older usually enter kindergarten with higher levels of achievement, and continue to excel in math and reading at higher levels through eighth grade when compared to children of mothers 18 and younger.
The negative consequences of teen mothers not only affect the child born when the mother was an adolescent, but they affect the mother's subsequent children as well.
Pamela Davis-Kean, associate professor of psychology said that the good news was that the children of teen mothers who continued their education after having children do better academically, than children of teen moms who didn't continue.
However, these children-and other children born to the mother when she wasn't an adolescent-never catch up in achievement across time to children whose mothers had them after completing their education, Davis-Kean said.
The study's data was taken from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, a nationally representative sample of children who were first assessed upon entering kindergarten in 1998 and were interviewed through spring 2007.
In 14,279 cases, the children's math and reading scores were collected in third, fifth and eighth grades.
Researchers used this data to compare achievement trajectories of children born either to teen moms or to adult mothers at the birth of their first child.
Trends indicated that mothers who gave birth during adolescence had much lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment in comparison to their counterparts who delayed pregnancy.
