Sexuality education for school-aged young people is a crucial component of all quality education systems. It prepares young people for participation in society as responsible, mature and community-minded citizens. Most contemporary school education curricula generally aim to enhance young people's knowledge, skills and understandings of the world,…

Background: Methodological challenges such as confounding have made the study of the early determinants of mental health morbidity problematic. This study aims to address these challenges in investigating antenatal, perinatal and postnatal risk factors for the development of mental health problems in pre-school children in a cohort of Western…

Although teen pregnancy and birth rates in the United States declined for ten straight years during the 1990s and were less than half of comparative figures from 1957, the year of the all-time high of teen pregnancy, nearly one in ten teenage young women still became pregnant in 2001, with half of these young women giving birth. Teen pregnancy…

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement creates incentives that reduce the likelihood of nonmarital…

This article is excerpted from the authors' "The Community-Based Doula: Supporting Families Before, During, and After Childbirth", published in 2006 by "ZERO TO THREE." In the U.S., many new parents are socially isolated and lack access to ongoing caring and support because of poverty, immigration, language barriers, or the growing mobility and…

This mixed-methods, context-oriented study explored transitions to motherhood among pregnant and newly parenting inner-city teenagers (n = 80) attending an alternative public school. Additionally, a novel research approach was assessed. Using data from a 2-year psychotherapy trial, inductive content analyses of therapy sessions and post hoc…

Becoming a parent is a major developmental transition of adulthood. Individuals often have optimistic expectations about parenthood, yet this transition also presents a number of challenges. The authors investigated whether new parents have overly optimistic expectations about parenthood and, if they do, how this influences their adjustment to…

This article explores connections between informal caregiving and identity transformation as experienced by pregnant teens. Based on in-depth interviews with 51 African American teen mothers, the article examines teens' pregnancy narratives as an example of narrative repair, illuminating how attending to processes that connect one's identity to…

Couples expecting their first child were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 28) and comparison groups (n = 38) to assess the efficacy of a couples intervention and examine marital satisfaction trajectories across the transition to parenthood. The primarily European American sample (M age = 30 years) completed assessments of marital…

This study examined the association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and maternal behavior during mother-infant interactions during the neonatal period. Participants included 84 mother-infant dyads (43 cigarette-exposed and 41 nonexposed) who were recruited after birth and assessed at 2 to 4 weeks of infant age. Results indicated that…

Dominant notions of reproduction perceive childbearing as physical processes that take place within womens bodies. This perception undermines non-physical components and removes men from the process. This project uses social constructionism to explore the locations women describe pregnancy and childbirth taking place in their childbearing…

Using data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, we examine residential variation in cohabiting women's union outcomes. Prior work has shown that although there are no residential differences in cohabitation, nonmetro women are more likely than others to marry directly and hold more favorable attitudes toward marriage. Building on this…

In the United States over one million adolescent girls will become pregnant each year. Adolescent pregnancy often leads to truncated educational attainment and subsequently results in a prolonged cycle of poverty and dependence. This study investigated feelings of self-esteem and romanticism among pregnant adolescents (N=276), adolescent mothers…

Teenage pregnancy and parenthood have unfortunate consequences for society, teenage mothers, and the children born to them. This report to the Senate is intended to provide information on (1) state strategies to reduce teen pregnancy and how states fund these efforts; (2) how welfare reform affected states' strategies; (3) the extent to which…

This report includes the meeting highlights from a policy seminar which looked at successful models of state action taken by Illinois, Maryland, and North Carolina to reduce the incidence of adolescent pregnancy. Shirley Randolph, Associate Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, described the Illinois initiative called Parents Too…