Challenges and transformations: childbearing and changes in teens’ educational aspirations and expectations

Although much of the focus on teen childbearing has been on its potential costs to teen parents and their children, emerging research suggests that teen childbearing while challenging can be a positively transformative experience for teens. One such transformation is enhanced educational aspirations and expectations. Much of the research on the positive consequences of teen childbearing for teens’ educational orientations, however, has come from in-depth interviews with teen mothers that have methodological limitations. Using panel data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and NLSY79 – Young Adult Survey 1994 (NLSY79-YA) this study finds that over time, teens’ educational expectations and aspirations increase, on average, regardless of parental status. Nevertheless, there is significant heterogeneity in how expectations and aspirations change. Teen parents have lower odds of increasing, and greater odds of decreasing, their aspirations and expectations over a 2-year period compared to their childless counterparts. These patterns, however, shift across cohorts. Unlike the NLSY79, there are no differences in the odds of lowering aspirations and expectations between teen parents and non-parents in the NLSY79-YA. Moreover, the lower odds of increasing aspirations/expectations among mothers and white teen parents compared to fathers and black teen parents in the NLSY79 cohort are not found in the NLSY79-YA.