DRAFT: PLEASE DO CITE OR REPRODUCE WITHOUT PERMISSION Maternal Health Status and Early Childbearing: A Test of the Weathering Hypothesis

The weathering hypothesis suggests that early childbearing is an adaptive mechanism for disadvantaged young women, especially African Americans, who believe that their health status may decline as they move through adulthood. Implicitly, weathering assumes that these young women use contextual clues to formulate the likelihood of their own future adult health. We propose a simple yet, to date, unexplored test of the basic assumption of the weathering hypothesis: does an adolescent’s mother’s self-rated health status predict her own odds of experiencing childbirth at a young age? If the weathering hypothesis is correct, poor maternal health and early childbearing will be positively correlated among African American youths, but not among white or Hispanic teens. Using a subsample of young women from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) we explore how maternal self-rated health when a young woman is age 14 is associated with her odds of experiencing a pregnancy before age 19, controlling for other individual, maternal, and family level characteristics. Findings suggest that poor maternal self-rated health is associated with increased odds of experiencing a non-marital birth before age 19; however, once we fully interact race/ethnicity with all of the covariates in the model this association is significantly only for white young women. Implications for the weathering hypothesis are discussed.