Having a baby as a teenager does not affect women’s educational and employment achievements later in life, but it does increase their chances of poverty by making it less likely that they will have a partner with a job, according to new research.
The study, by researchers John Ermisch and David Pevalin at Essex university’s Institute for Social and Economic Research, compared girls who became teenage mothers with girls who had become pregnant as teenagers, but had a miscarriage.
They point out that other comparisons, such as comparing teenage mothers with other women of the same age, are likely to be misleading because women who become teenage mothers may have had different educational or employment outcomes even if they didn’t have a baby.
They found that having a teen birth had little impact on the qualifications, employment or earnings of women at age 30, nor the chances that they had a live-in partner.
But the partners of women who had become teenage mothers were 20 per cent less likely to have a job and 20 per cent more likely to have no education beyond age 16. Having had a teen birth also made it substantially less likely that a woman and her family would be home owners by age 30.
