Closing the School Readiness Gap for Children Born to Teenage Mothers

Girls who grow up to become single mothers are usually more vulnerable to poverty, family dysfunction, behavioral problems, and poor performance in school, relative to other girls. Their lives become even more challenging when they are pregnant during their teenage years. Unfortunately, these disadvantages have consequences for their children’s school readiness. Indeed, their children are more likely to be born prematurely, have less stimulating home environments, perform less satisfactorily on standardized tests of cognitive skills, and display more behavioral problems than children born to average-age mothers.

In her paper, Dr. Amber L. Brown evaluates whether there is a difference in the school readiness of children born to teenage mothers versus children born to average-age mothers participating in the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) program. HIPPY is an early intervention initiative that seeks to help parents with limited schooling to prepare their three-, four-, or five-year-old children for school. The program was first developed in Israel and arrived in the United States in 1984. Members of the HIPPY community instruct other parents about how to become effective “first teachers” of their children. They utilize role playing, allowing instructors to address the needs of families who live in poverty and who often have limited education levels, in a nonthreatening and a nonjudgmental learning environment. The main goal of this 30-week curriculum is to increase continuity between school and home by enhancing specific skills in parents—language development, problem solving, logical thinking, and socioemotional aptitude—which previous research has shown to be important in closing the achievement gap in school readiness.

Brown’s study took place during the 2007-2008 school year within five urban school districts in Texas. The treatment group consisted of 18 randomly selected children born to teenage mothers who participated in HIPPY and who were already enrolled in kindergarten. The control group consisted of 18 randomly selected children born to average-age mothers who also participated in HIPPY and who were already enrolled in kindergarten. To be eligible for HIPPY, children must be economically disadvantaged, academically at risk, or homeless. For the study, only children enrolled in kindergarten at the targeted school districts, and who were their mother’s first child, were considered. Furthermore, for the treatment group, only children who were born when their mothers were 19 or younger were considered.

The treatment and control groups were very similar in other characteristics that could influence performance, such as gender, marital status of the mothers, country of origin of the mothers, and age at kindergarten entry. In addition to average age of the mothers at their child’s birth (17.5 years versus 27.1 years), average family annual income ($16,350 versus $20,570) was also different between the groups. As such, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of teenage motherhood on a child’s performance from the effect of a lower family annual income.

School readiness was evaluated after the children had already been enrolled in a school program. To measure this, Brown developed a 45-item survey for the children’s teachers, which was adapted from the Kindergarten Teacher Questionnaire used in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study by the National Center for Education Statistics. The survey listed items regarding the children’s skills related to five dimensions of school readiness first defined by the 1991 National Education Goals Panel (NEGP): health and physical development; emotional well being and social competence (ability to develop positive relationships with others and express feelings appropriately); approaches to learning, including curiosity; verbal communication skills; and cognition and general knowledge.

After the program, there were no statistically significant differences in the mean scores of any of the dimensions of school readiness between the children of younger and average-aged mothers. Since there was no baseline school readiness measurement for this group, there is no way to verify whether or not HIPPY training was the primary cause of increasing school readiness for children born to teenage mothers. However, an achievement gap did not exist for children after they participated in the HIPPY program, which suggests that the HIPPY training may have been effective in increasing the school readiness of children born to teenage mothers. They performed equally well on school readiness as the children born to average-age mothers who also participated in the program.

Targeted interventions like HIPPY can mitigate potential delays in school readiness for children born to teenage mothers, reducing or eliminating the expected gap. However, the small sample size of this study is a major limitation, and further research with a much larger sample is required, in addition to a stronger control group. Still, the study highlights the importance of developing early childhood programs for at-risk children—programs that embrace parents’ role as the first teachers of their children, no matter their level of instruction.

Article Source: Brown, Amber L. “The Impact of Early Intervention on the School Readiness of Children Born to Teenage Mothers.” Journal of Early Childhood Research 13(2), 2015.

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