University of Wisconsin - Madison Institute for Research on Poverty

The author examines the family background and attitudes of teenage fathers. She finds that a greater percentage of teen fathers than of teenagers who are not fathers come from poor and unstable households whose members are less educated; moreover, the fathers of teenage dads are less likely to hold professional positions and are more likely to be blue-collar workers than are the fathers of other teenage males. Also, teenage fathers have lower self-esteem, and a greater percentage of them believe that fate--and not they themselves--controls their lives. Generally speaking, for whites, being a teenage father is associated with having a low self-esteem, an external locus of control, and conservative sex-role attitudes, whereas for blacks, it is not. Data are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experiences-Youth Cohort. The Family Background and Attitudes of Teen Fathers This article examines the family background and attitudes of adolescent fathers. Relatively little is known about teen fathers, as most research on adolescent parenting has focused on mothers and their children, with good reason. The United States has a higher rate of teen pregnancy than any other industrialized country (Jones et al., 1985); in 1990 alone there were 533,483 births to women under the age of twenty (NCHS, 1993). Further, despite some controversy over the consequences of early parenting (Geronimus & Korenman, 1991), consensus continues to grow indicating that young mothers and their children suffer adverse outcomes that are varied and substantial (Miller & Moore, 1990; Hofferth & Hayes, 1987; Waite & Moore, 1978; Teti & Lamb, 1989; McAnarney & Hendee, 1989). Moreover, the public costs of adolescent parenting are increasing, having already been $19.83 billion in 1988 (Stone & Waszak, 1989; Burt & Levy, 1987). In that same year, over 50 percent of all Aid to Families with Dependent Children expenditures went to families in which the mothers were adolescents when their first child was born (Stone & Waszak, 1989). Because of the high personal and social costs of teen parenting, the antecedents, consequences, and factors associated with adolescent motherhood have been widely researched. In contrast, young fathers have seldom been the target of research. Our understanding of this population is not as broad or deep as that of young mothers. Currently, there are only eight published studies of young fathers that use nationally representative data. Two of them (Russ-Eft et al., 1979; Card & Wise, 1978) used Project TALENT data representative of fifteen-year-olds in 1960 to examine the antecedents and consequences of teenage paternity. Their results may be out of date, however, because significant social changes have occurred since 1960 with respect to adolescent sexuality and parenting. A recent study (Hanson et al., 1989) used a nationally representative sample of high school sophomores in 1980 from the High School and Beyond (HSB) Survey to examine selected characteristics of adolescent fathers, including their family backgrounds. 2 Five studies utilized various years of the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experiences-Youth Cohort (NLSY), which contains a nationally representative sample of 6,403 young men, of whom over 650 can be identified as adolescent fathers. However, three of these studies concentrated on other issues, such as behavioral problems of young fathers (Elster et al., 1987) or the educational and marital outcomes and initial living arrangements of adolescent fathers with their children (Marsiglio, 1986, 1987). While the remaining two NLSY studies (Lerman, 1986; Michael & Tuma, 1985) discussed the family backgrounds of young fathers, both grouped teenage fathers together with young men who became fathers in their early to mid-twenties. Further, the Lerman study focused exclusively on young men who did not reside with their children. The current study expands the earlier work on adolescent fathers in four key respects. First, unlike the Project TALENT and HSB samples, the NLSY data used by this author does not focus exclusively on an in-school population. This difference is potentially important, given that adolescent fathers disproportionately drop out of high school (Marsiglio, 1986, 1987; Pirog-Good, 1992) and hence may not be accurately captured in samples of students only. Second, unlike the other NLSY studies that have discussed the family backgrounds of young fathers have (Lerman, 1986; Michael & Tuma, 1985), the present analysis examines teenagers only, among whom fathering a child is more selective than among men in their early twenties. Third, this study used more detailed information on the home lives of young men than that provided by the single existing study of the family backgrounds of teen fathers (Hanson et al., 1989). Previous studies have used measures of household composition at a point in time. In contrast, the NLSY has data to permit construction of variables reflecting household composition for the first eighteen years of a respondent's life. Fourth, because of the relatively large number of observations on adolescent fathers available in the NLSY, racespecific attitudinal and family background differences for adolescent fathers and other young men are 3 provided. The results of the analyses find important differences for whites, blacks, and males of other races. FAMILY BACKGROUND AND ATTITUDES OF ADOLESCENT FATHERS: WHAT DO WE KNOW? Family Background The literature on the intergenerational transmission of attitudes and behaviors suggests that household structure and changes in this structure may be key determinants of the behavior and attitudes of children in adolescence and early adulthood (Michael & Tuma, 1985; Anderton et al., 1987; McBroom et al., 1985; Thornton, 1991 ; Benson et al., 1992). What can be gleaned from the limited literature on the backgrounds of adolescent fathers suggests that they are more likely to come from disrupted and disadvantaged backgrounds. There has been a series of studies which have touched briefly on the topic of the family backgrounds of adolescent or young fathers but which used small and nonrepresentative samples of fathers. For example, the first of these studies (Pauker, 1971) used data on personalities of 5,701 ninth-grade boys in Minnesota in 1954, of whom 94 later reported fathering a child out of wedlock. Of these 94 boys, 7 percent were from broken homes, a percentage three times higher than that of a control group matched on school, age, and socioeconomic status based on the father's occupation. Russ-Eft et al. (1979), in addition to their analysis of the Project TALENT data, conducted a case history analysis of twenty-eight adolescent fathers. They found that nine of the fathers had some stressful situation in their family such as separation or divorce of parents, abandonment by one of the parents, or chronic ailments affecting one or both of the parents. Fry and Trifiletti (1983) identified ninety-five adolescent fathers whose partners were attending prenatal or abortion counseling clinics. They found that 59 percent of the adolescent fathers came from mother-absent or father-absent households, or from families with a stepparent. Rivara et al. 4 (1985) studied one hundred black teen fathers from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, who were identified by mothers attending the University of Tennessee Center for Health Sciences Prenatal Clinic. Compared to controls, the teen fathers were more likely to have mothers who were teenage parents (77 percent v. 53 percent). The authors concluded that teenage fathers came from an environment in which teenage pregnancy was common, accepted, and believed to only minimally disrupt their lives. Studies based on large samples of students appear to echo the findings of the smaller studies. Using the HSB data, Card and Wise (1978) found that at age fifteen, boys who later became adolescent fathers already had lower educational expectations and came from households with lower socioeconomic status. Hanson et al. (1989) found that teen fathers more likely to be black, live in the South, live in a single-parent household, have a mother with fewer years of education, and come from low-income families. Robbins et al. (1985) studied 2,158 young adults first interviewed as seventh graders. Among males, having a pregnant girlfriend was associated with low parental socioeconomic status. The studies using the NLSY have focused primarily on topics other than the backgrounds of teen fathers and/or have included males who had become parents by their mid-twenties. Nevertheless, these studies have reinforced the notion that teen fathers are more likely to come from low-income and disrupted households. For example, Elster et al. (1987) found that adolescent fathers were less likely to have lived in an intact household at age fourteen. Lerman (1986) studied absent fathers up through age twenty-five and found that young absent fathers were more likely than other young men to come from families on welfare. Michael and Tuma (1985) found that family background variables were only significant in determining the fertility outcomes of white males but not of black or Hispanic men. 5 Attitudes Because of limited research on adolescent fathers, little is currently known about the attitudes of this population. Consequently, this article provides a description of three key attitudinal measures of teen fathers: self-esteem, locus of control, and sex-role attitudes. Previous research has found that self-esteem is correlated with juvenile delinquency, academic performance, and psychological depression (Rosenberg et al., 1989), as well as with adolescents' concerns about health, school, and family problems (Harper & Marshall, 1991). Additionally, among adolescents, low self-esteem and an external locus of control are associated with higher levels of alcohol abuse, drug use, delinquency, depression, low perceived access to occupational opportunities, and higher levels of social estrangement (Downs & Rose, 1991). Little is understood about the self-esteem and locus of control of adolescent fathers and how these measures change after the birth of a child. In a prospective study of Houston students who eventually became teen fathers, self-esteem as well as feelings of powerlessness were unrelated to the eventual status of the subjects as adolescent dads (Robbins et al., 1985). However, other prospective studies have found attitudinal differences to exist between teen fathers and their peers. Lower educational expectations (Card & Wise, 1978; Hanson et al., 1989). a more external locus of control, a lesser attachment to the importance of working, and greater acceptance of nonmarital childbearing have been reported among men who eventually became adolescent fathers (Hanson et al., 1989). Among retrospective studies of adolescent fathers, the findings on locus-of-control measures have been mixed. Some have found an external locus of control among adolescent fathers (Hendricks, 1981; Hendricks & Fullilove, 1983; Hendricks & Montgomery, 1984), whereas others have rejected the fate orientation which implies an externalization of responsibility (Hendricks, 1980; 6 Robinson et al., 1983). These studies have relied, however, on small. nonrepresentative, and largely black samples. While the sex-role attitudes of adolescent fathers have not been discussed in the literature, conformity to the stereotypical masculine role has been found to be predictive of delinquent behavior (Horwitz & White, 1987). Other attitudes, not discussed in this article, have been touched on in the literature on adolescent fathers. One small, retrospective study found that adolescent dads had greater feelings of anxiety, rejection, guilt, and self-blame than did adolescent men who were not fathers (Fry & Trifiletti, 1983).