Does Anyone Suffer from Teenage Motherhood? Mental Health Effects of Teen Motherhood in the UK are Small and Homogenous

Teen mothers experience disadvantage on a wide range of outcomes. However, previous research is equivocal with respect to possible long-term mental health consequences of teen motherhood and has not adequately considered the possibility that effects on mental health may be heterogeneous. Drawing on data from the BCS70, this paper applies a novel statistical machine-learning approach to estimate the effects of teen motherhood on mental health outcomes at ages 30, 34, and 42. We extend previous work by estimating not only sample-average effects but also individual-specific estimates. Our results show that sample-average mental health effects of teen motherhood are substantively small at all time points, apart from age 30 comparisons to women who first became mothers aged 25-30. Moreover, we show that these effects are largely homogeneous for all women in the sample – indicating that there are also no subgroups in the data that experience important detrimental consequences on their mental health. We conclude that there are no likely mental health benefits to policy and interventions aiming to prevent teen motherhood.