TheRoleof EducationLevel in the Intergenerational

Volume 35,Number 3,September 2009 Adolescent pregnancy has been linked to the perpetuation of poverty across successive generations of women in a family, largely because it interrupts young women’s schooling and reduces their chances of entering the job market.1–4 From a deterministic viewpoint, the underlying hypothesis is that the children of women who became pregnant as adolescents see early motherhood as the norm, and are more likely than others to follow their mother’s model of early childbearing and to subsequently raise their own children in poverty. In the early 1990s, Kahn and Anderson2 reviewed the U.S. literature and found that few studies had tested this hypothesis longitudinally, highlighting the inherent methodological difficulties of obtaining direct data from different generations. After analyzing data from the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth, these authors found a marked intergenerational pattern in which the daughters of women who had had their first child before age 20 were twice as likely as others to become teenage mothers. However, when this association was adjusted for variables that reflected the socioeconomic conditions in which these mothers had raised their daughters, the role of the mother’s age at first birth diminished substantially. In the same decade, Furstenberg et al.1 followed a cohort of U.S. children of black adolescent mothers over a 20-year period. They found an association between the mothers’ age at first birth and their daughters’ age at sexual initiation and at first pregnancy. Nevertheless, a large majority of second-generation men and women did not repeat the reproductive behavior of their mothers, and the authors attributed this in part to the legalization of abortion. In the first decade of the 21st century, longitudinal studies5–8 conducted in various countries have attempted to identify factors involved in the repetition of early childbearing across generations; such factors could be used to develop public policies aimed at delaying childbearing until adulthood. In Brazil, the association between adolescent pregnancy and poverty has been widely accepted.9 The argument that adolescent childbearing contributes to school dropout, lower education levels, poorer job opportunities and consequently lower income levels has featured prominently in Brazilian studies.10–13 Traditionally, Brazilian women became pregnant at an early age and had large families; in recent decades, however, several societal changes have influenced childbearing— among them, the wider availability of education, the greater participation of women in the job market and the increased use of contraceptive methods, which intensified in the 1960s.14 Since the 1970s, women’s fertility has declined, especially amonggroupswith thehighest fertility rates: blacks, the poor, the least educated and those living in rural areas or in the north or northeastern region of the country.15 TheRoleof EducationLevel in the Intergenerational PatternofAdolescentPregnancy inBrazil