Children of teen mothers tend to have lower levels of academic achievement than their peers, according to a University of Michigan study in the current issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

As early as kindergarten, children who were born to mothers age 19 or older tend to perform better on tests than children born to younger mothers, researchers found. The data came from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, which followed over 14,000 U.S. students between 1998 and 2007. That research tracked students' math and reading scores in third, fifth, and eighth grades, after initially assessing them in kindergarten. As the students got older, children with older mothers continued to have higher test scores than their peers.

The research also found that if a young mother continued her education after having children, her children went on to perform better on tests than they would if their mother had stopped her education after giving birth. However, within this group, a knowledge gap still existed between children with younger mothers and those with older mothers.

Even if a woman had a child when she was a teenager, then waited until she was older to have more children, those younger siblings would still score lower on tests than their peers whose mothers had never had a child as a teen, the study found.

 

Read the full article "Children Of Older Mothers Have Higher Test Scores" at The Huffington Post.