At a time when both political parties are hotly debating issues concerning family and children, Penn's Graduate School of Education will present a monthly seminar series on the health, safety and well-being of schoolchildren, based upon research conducted by the school's faculty.
"Kids Having Kids" will be the first lecture in the GSE series September 25. Dr. Rebecca Maynard will present the report she edited for the Robin Hood Foundation in New York. According to this groundbreaking study, adolescent childbearing costs U.S. taxpayers $6.9 billion per year, and the cost to the nation in lost productivity rises to as much as $29 billion annually.
The October lecture, "From Character Disorders to Conduct Disorders: Have we Lost Something in the Transition?" will be given by Dr. Joan Goodman. Other topics will include children and violence, literacy and co-parenting.
Dr. Maynard's talk will present other findings about children born to teen-age mothers, including:
*Girls born to adolescent mothers are up to 83 percent more likely to become teen-age mothers themselves, thus reproducing the cycle of poverty.
*Adolescent mothers are 50 percent more likely to repeat a grade and perform significantly lower on cognitive development tests. They are also far more likely to drop out of school than are the children born to women from the same socio-economic background who wait until the age of 20 or 21 to have children.
*Children born to teen-age mothers are more likely to be born prematurely and 50 percent more likely have a low birth weight than those whose mothers had waited four years to have children.
*These children are twice as likely to be abused or neglected.
*The teen-age sons of adolescent mothers are up to 2.7 times more likely to be jailed than teen-age sons of older mothers.
"The problem of early pregnancy resists easy solution. But surely one mark of a healthy society is that defeat does not lead to defeatism. Hence the virtue of reminding Americans of the dimensions of the scourge," Maynard said. "The real value of looking at the narrow dollars and cents calculation, is that people will pay attention."
Maynard is Trustee Professor of Education, Social Policy and Communication in the Graduate School of Education at Penn. She previously served as Senior Vice President of Mathematica Policy Research Inc., and was a consultant to the General Accounting Office, the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Graduate School of Education Dean Susan Fuhrman hopes the talks will facilitate sharing of research across the school and the university and call attention to the multiple challenges involved in educating today's student population.
All lectures in the seminar series, which is free and open to the public, will be at the Graduate School of Education Building, 3700 Walnut Street.
Return to Compass Features for September 17, 1996