In this paper, we use newly available data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate the effects of early motherhood on academic and behavioral outcomes for children born to early childbearers. We find that early motherhood's strong negative correlation with children's test scores and positive correlation with children's grade repetition is almost entirely explained by pre-birth individual and family background factors of teen mothers themselves. However, early childbearing is associated indirectly with reduced children's test scores through its linkage to family size (and thus to child birth order). We find a different pattern in predicting fighting, truancy, early sexual activity, and other problem behaviors among adolescent and young adult off-spring. For these behaviors, maternal age-at-first-birth remains an important risk-factor even after controlling for a wide range of background factors and maternal characteristics. These results highlight the diverse pathways through which teen parenting might influence subsequent child well-being and social performance.

Children born to early child bearers are more likely than other children to display problem behaviors or poor academic performance, but it is unclear whether early childbearing plays a causal role in these outcomes. Using multiple techniques to control for background factors, we analyze 2,908 young children and 1,736 adolescents and young adults in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults (CNLSY79) data sets to examine whether early childbearing causes children's outcomes. We find evidence that teen childbearing plays no causal role in children's test scores and in some behavioral outcomes of adolescents. For other behavioral outcomes, we find that different methodologies produce differing results. We thus suggest caution in drawing conclusions about early parenthood's overarching effect.

We use data from the 1989-2001 March Supplements to the Current Population Survey to determine whether welfare reform contributed to the declines in health insurance coverage experienced by low-skilled women over this period. During the 1990s, women with less than a high school education experienced a 10.1 percentage point decline in the probability of having health insurance. By contrast, during the same period, women with a high school degree experienced a smaller (3.6 percentage point) decline in health insurance coverage while women with a college education experienced only a very small decline in health insurance coverage. Against this backdrop of large overall declines in health insurance coverage, welfare waivers were associated with a modest, 1.8 percentage point, increase in health insurance coverage for low-skilled women by increasing their probability of having private health insurance, while Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) itself had no statistically significant effect. Overall, welfare reform did not contribute to declines in coverage but rather offset them somewhat. Unfortunately, some groups among low-skilled women did not experience these relative gains in coverage in response to reforms including non-employed women, AfricanAmerican women, unmarried women, and unmarried women with children. Neither welfare waivers nor TANF were associated with increases in insurance coverage among women with a high school or college education.

Cultures were incubated at 37°.Purification of Cell DNAs. DNA was extracted and purified from Kaplan and Ditzel and HR-1 continuous lymphoblastoid cell lines and from adult human liver and neonatal thymic tissue as described (11). Highly polymerized calf-thymus DNA was obtained from Worthington Biochemical Corp.Purification of EBV DNA. Cultures of HR-1 cells were maintained in spent medium at 320 for 10 days. The extracellular fluid was adjusted to 5% (w/v) polyethylene glycol 6000 and 0.5 M sodium chloride. After 24 hr at 40 the resultant sediment was separated by centrifugation at 6000 X g for 10 min at 4°. The pellet was resuspended in 0.05 M sodium phosphate buffer, pH 6.8 (phosphate buffer), and homogenized with 30 strokes of a tight-fitting Dounce homogenizer. The conditions used for purification of herpes viral nucleocapsids on sucrose velocity gradients and for extraction and purification of herpes viral DNA on neutral sucrose velocity gradients have been described (12). Nucleic acid banding at 52-62 S on neutral sucrose velocity gradients was subjected to equilibrium centrifugation in neutral cesium chloride, and DNA banding at a density of 1.

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