Deborah Keogh

Cognitive Readiness and Adolescent Parenting.

Hayes has written that about one million young women aged 15-19 become pregnant annually resulting in 500000 live births. The adverse long-term consequences associated with adolescent pregnancy include significant loss of education higher fertility rates the increased probability of single parenthood and increased dependence upon welfare assistance. Early parenthood also has critical implications for the children of young mothers who often suffer more developmental problems than children of older parents. The authors posit that due to their youth and relative inexperience adolescents knowledge of children and appropriate parenting practices is in general likely to be more limited than older mothers. Cognitive readiness for parenthood implies that mothers should be attitudinally predisposed to being a parent know how children develop and understand what constitutes appropriate parenting practices. Deficits in cognitive readiness among adolescents is thus hypothesized to predispose teen mothers to greater parenting stress as well as to less responsive parenting. The authors tested this hypothesis by comparing cognitive readiness for parenting in 171 pregnant adolescents 48 nonpregnant adolescents and 38 pregnant adults. They also assessed the relations between cognitive readiness and parenting stress and behavior to indeed find adolescents to be less cognitively prepared experiencing more stress in the parenting role and less adaptive in their parenting style than adult mothers. Relations between cognitive readiness and parenting stress and maternal interactional style were found. Additional analyses controlling for multiple demographic factors suggested that demographic variables played a role in explaining age-related differences in cognitive readiness as well as the relations between the readiness to parent and parenting behavior. Cognitive readiness however had unique and differential explanatory power in predicting parenting stress.

Self-instruction versus external instruction: Individual differences and training effectiveness

The effectiveness of self-instructional and external instructional approaches to teaching math skills was examined with nonretarded first-graders and mildly mentally retarded children. In addition, the relationship between the childrens math knowledge base, language proficiency, and attributional style and their performance under the two instructional conditions was assessed. The results suggested differential effects of training on the childrens performance. Mentally retarded children performed with greater accuracy under the self-instruction relative to external instruction, while normal ability children did not differ in accuracy under the two instructional formats. In addition, children with a lower math knowledge base performed better under self-instruction than with external instruction. Neither language proficiency nor attributional style predicted performance accuracy. Secondary analyses of number of problems solved suggested that whereas self-instruction was more beneficial than external instruction for mentally retarded children, the opposite was true for the nonretarded children. The educational and theoretical implications of the results were discussed.

Predictors of Resiliency in Adolescent Mothers

The adaptation of adolescent mothers to challenges encountered by early childbearing is characterized by much diversity. The focus of the current research was to identify protective factors at the time of the initial pregnancy that predispose the young mother to resiliency. These factors were used as predictor variables in a stepwise discriminatory model to categorize 103 early childbearers as resilient or vulnerable 5 years after the birth of their first child. Six variables accounted for 46% of the variance between the resilient and vulnerable mothers. Resilient adolescents had completed more schooling at the time of the pregnancy, were relatively younger, had more support from friends and siblings, more empathic parenting attitudes, and somewhat lower verbal intelligence scores than their vulnerable counterparts. The linear discriminant function based on these six variables was then applied to an independent sample of 26 adolescent mothers. The function correctly classified 67% of the vulnerable mothers and 92% of the resilient mothers. Implications for more focused interventions with pregnant adolescents are discussed.

Teaching severely retarded persons to sign interactively through the use of a behavioral script

The direct and generalized effects of a program for teaching severely mentally retarded individuals to sign interactively with one another in several social play situations was examined. As part of the teaching program, a behavioral script specifying the responses to be made was employed. The results indicated that participants showed an increase in their signing skills in a training play situation, generalized use of these skills in a second play situation, and maintained the trained skills over a two to four month period. Directions for future research are discussed.

Precursors of Mild Mental Retardation in Children with Adolescent Mothers

Publisher Summary This chapter presents data that focuses on development during middle childhood for children born to adolescent mothers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A prospective analysis of childrens development enabled to understand the effects of early parenting, in combination with other maternal personal, social, and emotional factors, on the emergence of mental retardation and other developmental delays. The chapter briefly describes the Notre Dame Adolescent Parenting Project and then summarizes major developmental patterns through age 5. It presents maternal and child data related to the emergence of “early signs” of mild mental retardation and learning disabilities, tracing childrens developmental trajectories for intelligence, language, adaptive behaviors, and adjustment for the entire sample as well as for children who at age 10 showed delays in intelligence and adaptation. The chapter also presents data on the role of parenting in helping to explain developmental delays, emphasizing new findings on the interrelationships between maternal and child developmental trajectories. In the concluding part of the chapter, three interrelated explanations are offered regarding factors that might influence childrens developmental delays: disorganized attachment, failures to teach and model self-regulation skills, and neglectful-abusive parenting.