Developmental researchers have begun to explore parental cognitions in an effort to better understand adolescent parenthood. However, most research on adolescent mothers has failed to relate cognitions of the mother to the child's functioning. To extend the research on adolescent‐parent families, we examined the association between adolescent mothers' knowledge of child development, parental expectations, and child‐rearing beliefs to their infants' or toddlers' coping behavior. Trained observers rated children on the three subscales of the Early Coping Inventory–Sensorimotor, Reactive Behavior, and Self‐Initiated Behavior. The findings indicated that the adolescent mothers' self‐reports of their expectations for their own and their children's behaviors and emotions accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in objective ratings of the children's coping behavior in the sensorimotor and reactive behavior domains. Adolescent mothers who reported more positive, more realistic, and more mature expectations about parenting, children, and the parent‐child relationship had children who were rated to display more adaptive and effective sensorimotor and reactive behavior coping capacities. An interaction between the adolescent mothers' knowledge and beliefs significantly predicted self‐initiated child behaviors. Implications of the findings include the importance of exploring a “good match” in adolescent mother‐child relationships.

The assumption that qualitative differences in adolescent mothers are associated with differences in child functioning was examined in a sample of 39 mother-infant dyads. Multiple measures of parental characteristics were used, including self-report measures of parenting expectations and mood orientation, and a qualitative behavioral measure of involvement. Analyses were conducted between these measures and observers' and mothers' judgments of the young children's social and emotional functioning. Trained observers rated the child's coping behavior and adolescent mothers rated their child on the Parenting Stress Index (PSI). Findings indicated that parenting expectations had a unique and differential power in explaining both objective child observation ratings and the mothers' PSI ratings of her child. In addition, interactions involving maternal positive behavior were related significantly to mothers' PSI ratings of the child's acceptability or reinforcement. Implications of the findings for early identification and intervention practices with at-risk young children and their families are discussed.The rate of adolescent, single parent families has increased by 350% in the past 30 years, representing one of the most dramatic changes in family shapes (Lindblad-