Does Anyone Suffer From Teenage Motherhood? Mental Health Effects of Teen Motherhood in Great Britain Are Small and Homogeneous

Abstract

Teen mothers experience disadvantage across a wide range of outcomes. However, previous research is equivocal with respect to possible long-term mental health consequences of teen motherhood and has not adequately considered the pos-si bility that effects on mental health may be heterogeneous. Drawing on data from the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study, this article applies a novel statistical machine-learning approach—Bayesian Additive Regression Trees—to estimate the effects of teen mother hood on mental health outcomes at ages 30, 34, and 42. We extend previous work by esti­mat­ing not only sam­ple-aver­age effects but also indi­vid­ual-spe­cific esti­ma­tes. Our results show that sample-average mental health effects of teen motherhood are sub-stan­tively small at all­time points, apart from age 30 com­par­i­sons to women who first became moth­ers at age 25‒30. Moreover, we find that these effects are largely homo-ge neous for all women in the sample—indicating that there are no subgroups in the data who experience important detrimental mental health consequences. We conclude that there are likely no men­tal health ben­e­fits to pol­icy and inter­ven­tions that aim to prevent teen motherhood.