Teen Pregnancy and Childbearing
Resources to Help
Parenting at any age can be challenging, but it can be particularly difficult for adolescent parents. In 2010, almost 370,000 babies were born to teen girls between the ages of 15 and 19.[1] Childbearing during adolescence negatively affects the parents, their children, and society. Compared with their peers who delay childbearing, teen girls who have babies are:
- Less likely to finish high school;
- More likely to rely on public assistance
- More likely to be poor as adults; and
- More likely to have children who have poorer educational, behavioral, and health outcomes over the course of their lives than do kids born to older parents.[2]
Teen childbearing costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars due to lost tax revenue, increased public assistance payments, and greater expenditures for public health care, foster care, and criminal justice services.[2]
The good news is that teen birth rates in the United States have declined almost continuously since the early 1990s — including a steep drop of nine percent from 2009 to 2010 — and are currently at historic lows.[3,4] Between 1991 and 2010, the teen birth rate decreased 44 percent in the United States (from 61.8 to 34.3 per 1,000 teens).[3,4] Despite this decline, the U.S. teen birth rate is still higher than that of many other developed countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom.[5]
Recent studies have explored strategies to reduce teen childbearing and its associated negative outcomes for parents, children, and society. For example, results from economic analyses suggest that implementing evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs, expanding access to Medicaid family planning services, and utilizing mass media campaigns to promote safe sex may reduce teen pregnancy and save taxpayer dollars.[6] Additionally, the Pregnancy Assistance Fund initiative of the Office of Adolescent Health (OAH) was set up to help pregnant and parenting teens receive the education, health care, parenting skills, and additional supports that they need. This help, in turn, may improve the likelihood of success in adulthood for these young parents, and reduce the probability that they will have or father other children as teens and that their children will grow up to become teen parents.
