Black-White Differences in Educational Attainment Among Women Who Experienced Teen Motherhood: The Role of Self-Efficacy

Background: Despite the recent decline in teen birth rates, teen motherhood is a serious social problem. Early motherhood is associated with a series of negative outcomes, including lower educational attainment, poorer employment opportunities, and increased marital disruption, which have a deleterious effect on short-term and long-term psychological well-being.

Although becoming a teen mother may limit educational opportunities, fostering a strong sense of self-efficacy, a woman’s perception about her capacity to achieve goals, may motivate teen mothers to pursue higher education.  The association between self-efficacy and educational attainment may differ by race. While all teen mothers face public castigation, black teen mothers have been particularly characterized as sustaining the culture of poverty. Moreover, the birth rate of black teens is more than twice as high as their white counterparts (and blacks have lower self-efficacy than whites on average). It may be more normative for black teens to have children while pursuing their education, but the stigma of being a teen mom may negatively impact their sense of self-efficacy.

The aim of this study is to test whether self-efficacy moderates the relationship between race and educational attainment among mothers who had their first child in their teens.

Methods: Data are from the 2001-2003 National Survey of American Life (NSAL) (N=6082).  I use an analytic sample of non-Hispanic black and non-Hispanic white women who began childbearing between the age of 12-19 (N=1281) to conduct nested ordered logistic regressions predicting level of education (i.e. less than high school, high school, some college, and college or higher).

Results: About 70% of the mothers in this sample are black, while 30% are white. About 59% of white mothers have high self-efficacy compared to 54% of black mothers. Also, about 44% of white mothers haven’t finished high school compared to 37% of black mothers.  Findings from the regression analysis reveal that self-efficacy is positively associated with educational attainment among blacks but not whites. For example, compared to white mothers with low self-efficacy, the odds of reaching the next highest level of education are 13% lower for white mothers with high self-efficacy and 9% lower for black mothers with low self-efficacy but 98% higher for black mothers with high self-efficacy.

Conclusions: Boosting self-efficacy has been an aim of Healthy Families of America, a national initiative that entails home visits to help teen parents provide their children with a healthy start in life. The results suggest that improving self-efficacy may be especially important for black teen mothers in these programs and also protect against the truncation of their education.