Project Background

The Adolescent Parenting Project at the University of Notre Dame was launched in the mid-1980s to evaluate the social and psychological consequences of teen parenting for both mothers and their children.  During the past 20 years, the Notre Dame Adolescent Parenting Project staff has gathered data on teen mothers and their children from pregnancy through the first 18 years of life.

The first phase of theis project was guided by a model of adolescent parenting that featured social, psychological, and biological variables that were thought to predispose the infants of adolescent mothers to early developmental problems.

The main focus of the second phase was on examine the emergence through age 5 of developmental delays in children of teen mothers, along wit their material antecedents

The third phase followed the children of teen mothers as they reached 8 and 10 years, developmental periods during which many childhood impairments, such as mild retardation, learning disabilities, and conduct problems, begin to be diagnosed..

The final phase of this project will involve collecting data when children reach age 14 and 18 years.  In this phase, we have three major aims: (1) to assess academic achievement and failures during middle school years as well as their major precursors; (2) to measure socioemotional adjustment and involvement in risky behaviors during the adolescent period and to determine their antecedents; and (3) to pinpoint the role of early maternal and child characteristics in explaining the development of children’s metacognitive knowledge and self-regulatory capacities and their subsequent influence on academic failures and successes.