Fathers of Infants Born to Adolescent MothersA Study of Paternal Characteristics

Ida I. Nakashima, MD, Bonnie W. Camp, MD, PhD

\s=b\Fifty-one male and 192 female sub-jects participated in an investigation ofthe characteristics of fathers of infantsborn to mothers aged younger than 18years. Fathers were categorized by age:younger than 20 years v older than 20years. Another group of older fatherspaired with older women (\m=le\20years)was included for comparison. The olderfathers paired with adolescent motherswere more similar to adolescent fathersthan to older men paired with olderwomen. The major differences betweenthe adolescent partners and older part-ners of adolescent mothers occurred inthe perception of marital conflict andego development. The adolescent cou-ple and the older man paired with anolder woman perceived more maritalconflict than did the older father andadolescent mother. Adolescent motherspaired with an older man also perceivedless marital conflict than adolescentwomen whose partners were adoles-cents.

(AJDC 1984;138:452-454)TX/Tuch has been written about the

teenaged mother, whose obstet¬rical, psychological, and social prob¬lems have been studied extensively.By contrast, comparatively few in¬vestigative studies have focused on thefather of the child. Indeed, in a criticalanalysis of research related to teen¬aged fathers, Robinson and Barrett1pointed out that "adolescent parent¬ing" refers almost exclusively to themother. Furthermore, much of thedata obtained about fathers of infantsborn to adolescent mothers is inferen¬tial, is often mixed with studies ofolder married fathers, and frequentlyis gathered from biased maternal re¬

ports rather than from the father him¬self.

Since the 1970s, social and legal

views have evolved from regarding thefather as "putative" to placing empha¬sis on his behavior and feelings andhelping him to accept paternal respon¬sibility. Pannor et al,2 in their study ofunmarried fathers, were among thefirst to scrutinize this group, and more

recently Panzarine and Elster3·4 havestudied adolescent fathers and the im¬pact that pregnancy has on them.

Pannor et al2 stated that the major¬ity of the fathers they studied (61%)were no more than four years olderthan the unmarried mothers. In work¬ing with pregnant teenagers, we havenoted that the majority of their part¬ners are of similar age, but a sizeablegroup is older. Our clinical hypothesiswas that the older men comprised amore passive and less adequate groupthan the younger men and, hence,were perhaps less threatened by girlsor women who were inexperienced andunsophisticated, such as the teenagedgirl whom they selected as a sexualpartner. No study, to our knowledge,has investigated the differences orsimilarities between older fathers andthose aged less than 20 years.

We also wondered whether therewere differences between the girls andyoung women who chose older men andthose who selected men or boys closerto their own age. For example, wewere interested in whether theyshowed more submissive traits and alower ego development level than theirpeers. The present communication de¬scribes the similarities and differencespossibly related to age, maturity, or

developmental level in couples com¬

posed of adolescent mothers with malepartners of different ages.

SUBJECTS AND METHODSSubjects

The basic population consisted of 192girls who were younger than 17 years at thetime of conception (mean age, 16.1 years).All attended obstetrical and pediatrie

clinics at the University Hospital of theUniversity of Colorado, Denver, were par¬ticipants in a larger study of attitudes andpersonality characteristics in adolescentmothers, and were willing and able to pro¬vide information about the age of the in¬fant's father. One group of 138 (young-young) had partners who were aged 19years or younger (mean age, 17.9 years). Asecond group of 54 (young-old) had part¬ners who were aged 20 years or older (meanage, 21.6 years). These couples provideddata for examining differences in adoles¬cent mothers who chose as their partneradolescents or older men.

Except for information concerning ageand education, examination of differencesin the fathers was performed on the subsetof fathers in each group who were availableand willing to provide information aboutthemselves. In the young-young group,there were 20 such fathers, and in theyoung-old group there were 15 such fa¬thers. A comparison group of older fatherspaired with older mothers was also re¬cruited from families attending well-babyclinics at the University Hospital. Thisgroup (old-old) was composed of 16 coupleswhose infant was 1 to 2 months old at thetime of the clinic visit. Women in this groupwere all aged 19 years or older and the men

were aged 20 years or older. The majority ofthe couples in all three groups were mar¬

ried (16 of 20 young-young couples, 14 of 15young-old couples, and 15 of 16 of old/oldcouples), and all of the fathers continued tobe actively involved with the mother afterthe baby's birth.

Participants, usually the mother or preg¬nant adolescent, were contacted at the timeof a clinic visit to complete the self-adminis¬tered procedures. If the father of the childwas present, he was also asked to completea set of questionnaires. If the father wasnot present but was available to the mother,she was asked to request the informationfrom him and return the questionnaires bymail. However, because little informationwas obtained with this latter procedure,the results presented herein are based pri¬marily on data obtained from fathers at thetime of a clinic visit.

All three groups of fathers represent a

subjectively random sample in the sensethat we approached any father who met

From the Adolescent Clinic, Department ofPediatrics, University of Colorado School of Med-icine, Denver.

Reprint requests to Adolescent Clinic, Depart-ment of Pediatrics, Box A024, University ofColorado Health Sciences Center, 4200 E NinthAve, Denver, CO 80262 (Dr Nakashima).

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Table 1.—Characteristics of Adolescent Mothers

Father Aged Father Aged=20yr(n = 138) >20yr(n = 54)

Variable" Mean SD Mean SDAge, yr 16.1 0.9 16.1 0.8Education, yrf 9.7 1.0 9.4 1.1PARI score

Conflictt 16.3 2.2 15.5 2.4

Hostility 31.6 7.3 31.9 5.3Control 38.5 7.2 38.6 7.4

Pregnancyquestionnaire score 160.2 40.7 149.0 32.9

Infancyquestionnaire score 80.9 23.0 81.9 22.3

Ego level score 3.5 1.1 3.6 1.2Authoritarian

ideology score (AFI) 18.6 3.8 18.4 3.8Vocabulary score 22.5 5.8 21.8 5.7Abstract

reasoning score 25.0 6.9 23.8 8.3

*PARI indicates Parental Attitude Research Instrument; AFI, Authoritarian Family Ideology Scale.tP<-1. <,05.

Table 2.—Characteristics of Three Groups of Fathers*

AdolescentFather WithAdolescent

Mother(n = 20)

Older FatherWith

AdolescentMother(n = 15)

Variable Mean SD Mean SD

Older FatherWithOlder

Mother(n = 16)

Mean SDAge, yr 17.9 0.8 21.6 2.0 26.6 4.6Education, yrf 10.9 1.0 11.4 1.0 13.5 1.6PARI score

Conflict* 16.3 2.7 14.8 1.7 17.0 1.9Hostility 32.4 7.2 30.0 6.6 32.5 5.5Control 36.4 9.7 37.0 6.1 35.6 9.5

Authoritarianideology score (AFI) 18.5 3.4 19.9 3.4 16.4 4.3

Vocabulary scorei 25.7 4.5 25.0 3.5 29.9 4.6Abstract

reasoning score 30.3 5.8 26.2 7.7 30.0 6.9 Adolescent fathers were aged less than 20 years; older fathers were aged 20 years or more. PARI

indicates Parental Attitude Research Instrument; AFI, Authoritarian Family Ideology Scale.tP<.01. <.05.

criteria for inclusion in the study and whoattended clinic when a research assistantwas available. Nevertheless, the samplingwas somewhat spotty, since even demo¬graphic information was sometimes un¬available on the male partner of pregnantadolescents. Selection bias is undoubtedlypresent, because one would expect largedifferences between men or boys involvedin a continuing relationship and willing toparticipate in the study and those who wereunavailable. At the same time, there was noreason to believe that sampling bias pro¬duced differences observed among the

three groups who actually participated inthe study. Furthermore, the two subsam-ples of fathers with adolescent partnerswere almost identical in age and educationto the larger populations from which theywere drawn.

ProceduresThe following types of information were

obtained when possible.Demographic Data.—Information on

age, education, and ethnicity of both fa¬thers and mothers was obtained directly or

from the birth certificates of the infants.

Parental Attitudes.—An abbreviatedversion of the marital conflict, hostility, andcontrol scales from the Parent AttitudeResearch Instrument (short-form)6 dealingwith parental attitudes was administeredwith revisions recommended to avoid socialbias.6·7 The Authoritarian Family IdeologyScale8 was used to measure nonpunitiveauthoritarian attitudes. Participants werealso given the Washington University Sen¬tence Completion Test for Ego Develop¬ment.910 In this semiprojective test, therespondent is asked to complete 36 in¬complete sentences. Responses are scoredaccording to the scheme set forth by thedevelopers and then are tallied to providean estimate of ego development within theframework of the developers' theory.Scores on this scale range from a low of 1,reflecting an impulsive level of develop¬ment, to a score of 9, representing an

autonomous, well-integrated level of func¬tioning. The average score in populations ofyoung adults is 5, which corresponds to atransitional level between conformity andpostconformity. The final test administeredto both male and female participants wasthe Shipley Hartford Institute of LivingScale." This brief multiple-choice test mea¬sures vocabulary and abstract thinking.

Pregnancy and infancy questionnaires12were given to the mothers for completion.The responses were measures of themother's attitude toward the pregnancy(obtained during the pregnancy) and at¬titude and acceptance of the infant between2 and 4 months of age.

RESULTS

The first group of analyses ad¬dressed the question of whether therewere differences in adolescent girlswho chose a boy or an older man as a

partner. Table 1 shows means and SDsof scores for the two groups of adoles¬cent girls.

Only one measure, marital conflict,showed a significant difference(P<.05), although differences in edu¬cational status approached signifi¬cance.

The second group of analyses ad¬dressed the question of whether thereare differences between boys and oldermen who are fathers ofchildren born toadolescent mothers. In addition, thesetwo groups of fathers were contrastedwith a group of older fathers pairedwith older women to highlight distinc¬tions between age and psychosocialstatus of the men. Table 2 presentsmeans and SDs for characteristics as-

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sessed in the fathers.Analyses of variance performed on

the data in Table 2 showed significantdifferences among the men in educa¬tion, vocabulary score, and maritalconflict. With the exception of themarital conflict scale, the pattern ofdifferences consistently showed thatthe boys and older men paired withadolescent women were similar,whereas older men paired with olderwomen were better educated and hadbetter vocabularies. On the maritalconflict scale, however, the older men

paired with adolescent mothers per¬ceived significantly less conflict in re¬

lationships than the other two groupsof men(P<.05).

Analysis of ego development was

performed by tabulating the number offathers in each group who were charac¬terized as preconformity, conformity,or transitional or postconformity inlevel of functioning. A 3 x 3 2 analysisyielded a 2 (4, = 43) value of 13.0(P<.05). The pattern of results indi¬cates that the fathers in the old-old

• pairs were typically functioning at thetransitional or postconformity level(eight of 14) characteristic of youngadults, whereas the fathers in theyoung-old pair were functioningmostly at the conformity level (eight of12) and the fathers in the young-youngpair were functioning at the preconfor¬mity level (nine of 17). Both groups ofadolescent mothers, like the adoles¬cent fathers, were more likely to befunctioning at a preconformity level ofego development.

COMMENTThe similarities between the two

age-defined groups of men and boyswho paired with adolescent womenwere greater than the differences. No

significant differences were noted intheir hostile or controlling attitudestoward childrearing or in their cog¬nitive functioning. However, bothmembers of the adolescent mother-older father combination regarded in¬terpersonal relationships (signified bythe marital conflict scale) as less con-flictual than either the adolescentmother-adolescent father or oldermother-older father combinations.This result suggests that the adoles¬cent mother-adolescent father pairmay be less likely to compromise andmore likely to fit the characterizationof the unwed father and unwed motheras "immature, and too little concernedwith the needs of others."2 Because oftheir youth and relative inexperience,each member of the adolescentmother-adolescent father pair mayhave unrealistic expectations of therelationship that may not survive thedisappointment of unmet needs. More¬over, the strain of attempting to copewith similar developmental tasks andthe additional burdens of early parent¬hood may erode their affiliation to thebreaking point.

By contrast, it may be that the ado¬lescent mother-older father coupleperceives less discord initially becausethe adolescent mother is more sub¬missive, defers to her mate, andassumes that he will be more capablebecause of his greater age and experi¬ence. However, the older man whopairs with an adolescent girl is more

like the adolescent father than he islike the older man who pairs with anolder woman. The older man choosingan older woman was superior in educa¬tion and vocabulary and showed a

higher level of ego development thaneither of the age-defined groups offathers who selected adolescent part-

ners. The resemblance of the olderman who chooses an adolescent part¬ner to the adolescent father was soconsistent that it supports the clinicalimpression of inadequacy in the olderman who chooses the adolescentwoman and raises the question of de¬velopmental arrest in these men. If theadolescent mother becomes a more

mature person and recognizes herpartner's incompetence, the equa¬nimity of this relationship may bedisturbed. Conversely, it is possiblethat mutual perception of decreasedconflict augurs favorably for greaterstability in this relationship.

At present, any connection betweenmarital conflict scores and stability ofrelationships is clearly conjectural.The fragility of adolescent-to-adoles¬cent marriage is well documented, butfurther study will be required to deter¬mine whether the durability of themarital relationship is related to thefather's age or to the perception ofmarital conflict.

Overall, this study, along with oth¬ers,1814 indicates that a significantnumber of adolescent mothers are

paired with older men. This factormust be taken into account when con¬

sidering measures to prevent adoles¬cent pregnancy. For those families ofadolescent mother-older father al¬ready in existence, the type of sup¬porting help and the most appropriatemethods of intervention may be differ¬ent from those needed by teenagedcouples.

This study was supported in part by grantRR-63 from the General Clinical Research Cen¬ters Program, Division of Research Resources,National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md, andby funds from the Developmental PsychobiologyResearch Group Endowment Fund by the GrantFoundation to the Department of Psychiatry,University of Colorado School of Medicine, Den¬ver.

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