ABSTRACT
The cognitive deficits and nonadaptive social functioning associated with children of teen mothers in the USA have been well-documented (Baldwin and Cain 1980; Furstenberg 1976; Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn and Morgan 1987; Phipps-Yonas 1980). For example, these children tend to perform more poorly on intelligence and academic tests and to be more impulsive and distractible than peers born to older mothers. The scope of the problems can be expected to increase in the coming decade as data on parenting show that the birthrate of unmarried adolescents 14 to 18 years of age has been rising steadily since 1965, particularly for very young adolescents under 15 and among 15 to 17-yearold whites (Guttmacher Institute 1981; Thornton and Freedman, 1983). Augmenting the difficulty is the increasingly large percentage of unwed young mothers who keep their babies rather than give them up for adoption. In 1981, the figure was 96 per cent (Guttmacher Institute 1981). It has been estimated that there are over half a million babies born each year to adolescent mothers in the United States (Hayes 1987), thus half a million infants who are likely to face difficulties in attaining their optimal development.
