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January 23, 2008Teen Pregnancy and Poverty: 30-Year-Study Confirms That Living in Economically-Depressed Neighborhoods, Not Teen Motherhood, Perpetuates Poverty |
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From Ascribe Newsfeed: For the past 15 years, political pundits have been telling us a dark fairy tale about American teens, blaming America's high poverty rates on the actions of teenage girls who have babies out of wedlock. But a new longitudinal study by Frank Furstenberg (University of Pennsylvania) shows that fairy tales have no place in the realm of policy-making. His data reveal that teen childbearing is NOT the reason that many Americans have been trapped in poverty over the past three decades. For details and policy recommendations, please read Furstenberg's full briefing report, below, or at www.contemporaryfamilies.org. The United States, one of the richest nations in the world, has higher poverty rates than any advanced Western country other than the former Soviet Union. The teen mothers in Baltimore did better than most observers would have predicted in continuing their education, and did not fare substantially worse than their counterparts who postponed parenthood until their twenties. This finding from my Baltimore study is supported by a growing body of research by economists, demographers, and sociologists. They typically used the support that they received to return to school or invest time in childrearing when their children were young. We provide direct, immediate access to mainstream national media for 600 colleges, universities, medical centers, public-policy groups and other leading nonprofit organizations. AScribe transmits news releases directly to newsroom computer systems and desktops of major media organizations via a supremely trusted channel - The Associated Press. We also feed news to major news retrieval database services, online publications and to developers of web sites and Intranets. And AScribe does it at a cost all organizations, large and small, can afford, a fraction of what corporate newswires charge.
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