Cognitive Readiness to Parent Among Primiparous Adolescent and Adult Mothers and Its Impact on Child Outcomes at 12 Months

Background and purpose:  Because children born to adolescent mothers are at an increased risk for cognitive delays and behavioral problems, it is critical to identify parental risk factors to inform early interventions to improve children’s outcomes.  The main purpose of this study was to examine children’s cognitive and socio-emotional functioning at 12 months by using prenatal cognitive readiness of primiparous mothers as predictors of parenting at 4 months.  In this study, cognitive readiness to parent was defined as knowledge of infant development, parenting style, and parenting attitudes.  Differences between adolescent and adult mothers, who varied in their educational attainment, were also observed.  

Methods: This study used data from the Parenting for the First Time Project, which collected data from a sample of primiparous women from primary care facilities in 5 cities in the U.S.  Data were collected from the prenatal stage through the first 36-months.  In this study, data from the prenatal stage (cognitive readiness), 4 months (parenting), and 12 months (child outcomes) assessments were used.  The mothers were divided into three groups: teenage mothers (57.4%); adult mothers with low education (23.5%); and adult mothers with high education (19.1%).  The sample of mothers was ethnically and racially diverse (60.9% African-American, 19.5% White, 18.3% Hispanic, and 1.4% Other).  The average age for the teen mothers at the time of the child’s birth was 17.5 years (SD = 1.2), 25.5 years (SD = 3.2) for low-education adult mothers, and 27.8 years (SD = 3.9) for high-education adult mothers.  Bivariate analyses were conducted to compare the difference among these groups of mothers.  Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to understand the effects of early parenting on children’s developmental outcomes at 12 months of age. 

Results: Bivariate analyses showed that teen mothers were less like to be cognitively ready to parent, be warm, or be supportive for learning than adult mothers.  The SEM results showed that the links between prenatal cognitive readiness and parenting were strong on all three constructs: Warmth, negative parenting, and support for learning.  Both groups of adult mothers were rated as significantly warmer in their interactions with their infants than teen mothers.  In terms of support for learning, both groups of adult mothers had higher scores than teen mothers.  Overall, parenting behaviors during infancy were related to children’s socioemotional development at 12 months, but not to cognitive development.

Conclusion and implications: This study found evidence to support the relationships between prenatal cognitive readiness to parent and mothers’ parenting behaviors in infancy, and subsequently, children’s development in a socioeconomically diverse sample of primiparous mothers.  These results suggest the importance of cognitive readiness in setting the stage for better parenting, which promotes positive, early social development for children.  These findings inform social work and public health interventions to increase cognitive readiness to parent prior to the birth of their children, to teach the key milestones of child development, and to parent in a warm and responsive manner.  By increasing the preparedness of expectant mothers, we could improve parenting and children’s socio-emotional outcomes.