Intergenerational Continuity and the Mechanisms of Childhood Adversity Among Teen Mothers and Their Offspring

Background and Purpose: Experiencing childhood adversities, including child maltreatment and dysfunctional household, are known to have a negative dose-response effect on mental health and behavioral problems over the life course. In contrast to the extensive evidence of within-generation impact of childhood adversities on later behavioral outcomes, the intergenerational impact of childhood adversity has received less attention. The current study aims to examine the intergenerational continuity of childhood adversity among teen mothers and their offspring. The study builds on prior work and examines the potential mechanisms of intergenerational continuity of childhood adversity among teen mothers and their offspring. In addition, childhood adversity was unpacked by its two domains - child maltreatment vs. household dysfunction - to investigate how each domain differently shapes the intergenerational continuity of childhood adversity and its mechanisms.

Methods: The study used data from the Young Women and Child Development Study, a longitudinal study examining a broad range of developmental outcomes spanning multiple developmental periods of teen mothers and their offspring. Eligible participants were pregnant, unmarried adolescents aged 17 years or younger who were planning to carry their babies to term at the time of enrollment. The current study used 9 waves of data (N=240). The analytic strategy had three parts. First, the study measured the total effect of teen mother's childhood adversity on offspring's childhood adversity. Second, we tested the indirect effect of two sub-scales of parenting stress (i.e. parental distress and parent-child dysfunctional interaction) to examine whether teen mother's parenting stress mediates the association between teen mother's childhood adversity and offspring's childhood adversity. Third, the study extended the mediation model to domain-specific childhood adversity (maltreatment vs. household dysfunction) to identify whether a domain of childhood adversity of teen mothers is more predictive of their offspring's childhood adversity domains, through parental distress and parent-child dysfunctional interaction mechanisms. Covariates included teen mother's age (continuous), offspring's sex, offspring's race, teen mother's educational attainment at offspring's age 5.5, and grandmother's educational attainment. Multiple fit indexes were used to evaluate the model fit, including comparative fit index (CFI) >.95, root-mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA) <.06, and standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) <.0.08. Analyses were conducted in Mplus version 8.5. Missing data were managed with full information likelihood estimation.

Results: Findings suggest that teen mother's childhood adversity was linked indirectly to offspring's childhood adversity (at age 11.5 years) through parental distress. Specifically, parental distress mediated the association between teen mother's maltreatment and offspring's household dysfunction. No other indirect effect paths were statistically significant.

Conclusions and Implications: Our results may be of particular use for social work interventions designed to mitigate parenting stress and eventually to prevent the cycle of childhood adversity across generations. Efforts should focus on the early prevention and intervention. Strategies to prevent childhood adversity from happening in the first place as well as to change environment and behaviors in ways that can mitigate the harms of childhood adversity are needed. In addition, targeting teen mother's parenting stress is necessary, in order to reduce offspring's childhood adversity exposures.