Teen Motherhood, Labor Market Involvement and the Receipt of Public Assistance

The difficulties experienced by young women who give birth as teenagers have been well-documented and impose a significant cost to these women and to society (Maynard, 1997). For instance, teen mothers are far less likely to work compared to other women who delay child-bearing, leading to lower earnings for the family and reduced national output for society. Their lower earnings places the family at far greater risk of falling into poverty and increases expenditures on public assistance made to provide the family with a minimal living standard. These and other costs of teen childbearing have led to the proposal of several policy alternatives designed to alleviate them. In the late 1980s, three policies were implemented in experimental forms designed to allow researchers to evaluate their effectiveness along a multitude of dimensions. The three demonstrations were Ohio's Learning, Earning, and Parenting (LEAP) program, the New Chance Demonstration (NCD), and the Teenage Parent Demonstration (TPD). LEAP provided financial incentives to teen mothers in the treatment group designed to increase school enrollment/attendance that, it was hoped, would subsequently increase labor market participation and reduce welfare receipt. The NCD offered voluntary employment and training services to teenage mothers. The treatment in TPD was mandatory and included child-care and transportation assistance along with sanctions for failure to participate. This paper will synthesize the evidence from the existing academic literature regarding the effects of teen childbearing and the results of these three experiments, paying particular attention to labor market involvement and public assistance receipt in the years following birth for those women who had children as teens. The academic literature has attempted to determine whether teen motherhood itself "causes" the outcomes that follow, or whether the characteristics of those women who give birth as teens are such that they would have experienced subsequent difficulties even in the absence of the birth. Recent research suggests that perhaps little, if any, of the inferior outcomes that are associated with teen motherhood may be directly attributable to giving birth as a teen. The experimental findings, which show policies directed at improving outcomes for teen mothers are only modestly effective at best, seem to coincide with this view. The paper will first present a review of the academic literature, proceed to describe and highlight the findings of the three demonstration projects, then discuss the relationship between the two sets of results. We conclude with the implications for policy and future research. * Prepared for the conference: Synthesizing the Results of Demonstration Programs for Teen Mothers November 1997