COLUMBUS – A new study at OSU has turned up some surprising findings concerning the links between an age at which a woman has her first child and her marital status and her health later in life.
Researchers found that women who had their first child in their early 20s did not report better health at midlife than those who had their first baby as a teen, said Kristi Williams, lead author of the study and associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.
“We’ve had all this focus on the bad effects of teen childbearing and never really asked what happens if these teens waited to early adulthood,” she said. “The assumption has been that ‘of course, it is better to wait.’ But at least when it comes to the later health of the mother, that isn’t necessarily true.”
The study also counters the conventional wisdom that says women who have a baby outside of marriage will be healthier if they get married.
Williams says her study found that single African-American women who had a child and later married actually reported worse health at midlife than those who had a baby but stayed single.
This result suggests that public policies encouraging marriage among single mothers may have some unintended negative consequences, Williams said.
This result suggests that public policies encouraging marriage among single mothers may have some unintended negative consequences, Williams said.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, in which more than 3,000 women were interviewed every one or two years from 1979 through 2008, those who were age 25 to 35 when they had their first birth also tended to report better health at age 40 than those between 15 and 24.
But there was no significant difference in midlife health for those with teen births compared to those who waited until they were age 20 to 24, Williams said.
The study appears in the December 2015 issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.