Saturday, 15 January 2005 - 10:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Sexual Health and Addiction Services in Adolescents

The Association between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Negative Adult Outcomes : an Approach to Teen Childbearing Using New Formulations

Purpose

There is evidence that a history of prior physical and sexual abuse predicts poverty, income stability, substance use, increased depression, stress, and parenting difficulties for mothers who parent as adults (Kendler, Bulik, Silberg, Hettema et. al 2000). Though fruitful for the examination of outcomes for mothers who first parented as an adult, until now research on the consequences of childhood adversities on adult mothers who parented as teens is underresearched. This study examines the association between now-adult teen mothers’ experiences of childhood adversities, problematic parenting behaviors and adverse adult outcomes.

Method

Data for this study came from the National Comorbidity Study (NCS), a project meant to address the widespread prevalence of comorbidity of mental health and substance use disorders in the U.S. The NCS used stratified, multistage area probability sampling to select subjects from the noninstitutionalized civilian population aged 15-54 years living in the 48 contiguous states. The final sample consisted of 8098 participants. Twenty-six stressful life events or adversities were considered. The questionnaire assessed four categories of adverse experiences: 1) Five are interpersonal loss events; 2) eight are measures of parental psychopathology; 3) eight are interpersonal traumas; and, 4) five are miscellaneous other pathologies. Controlling for significant demographic factors, logistic regression was used to examine the association between the four categories (range=0 to 4) of adverse childhood experiences and factors that contain the variables for this study. Each factor--education, employment status, relationship status, financial status, and reported health/mental health--contain several dichotomous variables which were coded for analysis. Variables with non-dichotomous criteria were expanded to create dichotomous variables. Age of onset of mood, anxiety or substance use disorders were used as a control to adjust for confounding of exposure with cohort and cohort with persistence.

Results

If exposed during childhood to even modest levels of childhood adversities, adult mothers who parented as teens were significantly more likely to report adverse outcomes such as: low educational attainment, unstable lifetime employment, substance abuse, aggressive behaviors toward their children and longterm financial difficulties. As exposure to child adversities rose from zero to 1 to 2, 3 or 4, the probability for adverse outcomes also rose consistently and steadily.

Implications

Currently, there are considerable resources dedicated to preventing subsequent births to mothers who first parented as a teen; while very few state and federal resources are committed to integrated programs that support and address thriving through experiences of childhood adversity. By highlighting a dimension of these mother’s lives that is rather under investigated by scholars in general, psychosocial stress and trauma research represents a crucial addition to mainstream teen mothering scholarship, and social services approaches. When considering adverse consequences for adult mothers who parented as a teenager, we may now direct our attention away from age and appropriate birth timing and begin to focus on developing models of support and intervention specifically aimed at addressing childhood adversities and trauma.

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