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Background: Worldwide, approximately 14 million mothers aged 15 - 19 years give birth annually. The number of teenage births in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is particularly high with an estimated 50% of mothers under the age of 20. Adolescent mothers have a significantly higher risk of neonatal mortality in comparison to adults. The objective of this review was to compare perinatal/neonatal mortality in Sub Saharan Africa and it's associated risk factors between adolescents and adults., Results: We systematically searched six databases to determine risk factors for perinatal/neonatal mortality, and pregnancy outcomes, between adolescent and adults in SSA. Article's quality was assessed and synthesized as a narrative. Being single and having a single parent household is more prevalent amongst adolescents than adults. Nearly all the adolescent mothers (97%) were raised in single parent households. These single life factors could be interconnected and catalyze other risky behaviors. Accordingly, having co-morbidities such as Sexually Transmitted Infections, or not going to school was more prevalent in younger mothers., Conclusions: Inter-generational support for single mothers in SSA communities appears essential in preventing both early pregnancies and ensuring healthy outcomes when they occur during adolescence. Future studies should test related hypothesis and seek to unpack the processes that underpin the relationships between being single and other risk indicators for neonatal mortality in young mothers. Current policy initiatives should account for the context of single African women's lives, low opportunity, status and little access to supportive relationships, or practical help.

In developing countries, employment rates for mothers with young children are relatively low. This study analyzes how maternal labor market outcomes in Argentina are affected by the preschool attendance of their children. Using pooled household surveys, we show that 4-year-olds with birthdays on June 30 have sharply higher probabilities of preschool attendance than children born on July 1, given enrollment-age rules. Regression-discontinuity estimates using this variation suggest that preschool attendance of the youngest child in the household increases the probability of full-time employment and weekly hours of maternal employment. We find no effect of preschool attendance on maternal labor outcomes for children who are not the youngest in the household.

Robert Hummer and Erin Hamilton note that the prevalence of fragile families varies substantially by race and ethnicity. African Americans and Hispanics have the highest prevalence; Asian Americans, the lowest; and whites fall somewhere in the middle. The share of unmarried births is lower among most foreign-born mothers than among their U.S.-born ethnic counterparts. Immigrant-native differences are particularly large for Asians, whites, and blacks. The authors also find racial and ethnic differences in the composition and stability of fragile families over time. Although most parents of all racial and ethnic groups are romantically involved at the time of their child's birth, African American women are less likely to be in a cohabiting relationship than are white and Hispanic mothers. Over time, these racial and ethnic differences become more pronounced, with African American mothers having the lowest rates of marriage and cohabitation and the highest breakup rates, and Mexican immigrant mothers having the highest rates of marriage and cohabitation and the lowest breakup rates. Fragile families have far fewer socioeconomic resources than married families, though resources vary within fragile families by race and ethnicity. White mothers, in general, have more socioeconomic resources than black, Mexican American, and Mexican immigrant mothers; they are more likely to have incomes above the poverty limit, more likely to own a car, less likely to have children from a prior relationship, and more likely to report living in a safe neighborhood. Access to health care and child care follows a similar pattern. The exception is education; black and white unmarried mothers are equally likely to have finished high school, and Mexican immigrant and Mexican American mothers are less likely to have done so. The authors argue that socioeconomic differences are by far the biggest driver of racial and ethnic differences in marriage and family stability, and they support reforms to strengthen parents' economic security. They also discuss how sex ratios and culture affect family formation and stability. In particular, they note that despite severe poverty, Mexican immigrant families have high rates of marriage and cohabitation--an advantage that erodes by the second generation with assimilation. To address the paradox that marriage declines as socioeconomic status improves, they support policies that reinforce rather than undermine the family ties of Mexican immigrants.

This article discusses Helen Safa's analyses of the impact of development strategies and social policies on gender relations and women headed families in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico. The discussion focuses on findings of a research project regarding patterns of women's employment, autonomy, marital relations, family headship and poverty in Puerto Rico in the decade beginning in the year 2000, using excerpts from interviews conducted with women workers displaced from a clothing and a tuna factory between 2001 and 2002 (Colón et al. 2008), as well as data from the Public Use Sample (PUMS) of the U.S. Census Puerto Rico Community Survey 2005-2007. It is argued that women's employment has resulted in advances in women's autonomy, gender equity, and renegotiations of the provider role, but, intensified by men's unstable earnings, it has also led to the increase of female family headship even among married women. Women's education and employment have been an important means of reducing family poverty both among dual earner families and female heads. Yet, the continuing joblessness in the Island places even higher educated sectors on the verge of economic precariousness.

Nearly every European Country has experienced some increase in nonmarital childbearing, largely due to increasing births within cohabitation. Relatively few studies in Europe, however, investigate the educational gradient of childbearing within cohabitation or how it changed over time. Using retrospective union and fertility histories, we employ competing risk hazard models to examine the educational gradient of childbearing in cohabitation in eight countries across europe. In all countries studied, birth risks within cohabitation demonstrated a negative educational gradient. When directly comparing cohabiting fertility with marital fertility, the negative educational gradient persists in all countries except Italy, although differences were not significant in Austria, France, and West Germany. To explain these findings, we present an alternative explanation for the increase in childbearing within cohabitation that goes beyond the explanation of the Second Demographic Transition and provides a new interpretation of the underlying mechanisms that may influence childbearing within cohabitation.

With dramatic growth in nonrmarital births, an increasing number of children are growing up in single-mother families. This study examines the relationships among nonresident fathers' parenting and children's behavioral and cognitive development in low-income, single-mother families. It also considers the personal characteristics of the children's single mothers as well as family processes and economic circumstances. Analyses use the first three waves of longitudinal data from a subsample of single and noncohabiting mothers in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Results suggest that nonresident fathers' parenting is indirectly associated with children's behavior problems and cognitive development. The findings further suggest that those estimated associations are transmitted through mothers' parenting. The study also discusses the policy and practice implications of its findings.

Using the first (1995) and third (2001-2002) waves of the Add Health survey, we examine women 's family transitions up to age 24. Only a third of all women marry, and a fifth of those marriages dissolve before age 24. Three out of eight women have afirst birth, with a substantial majority of those births outside of marriage: 66% for whites, 96% for blacks, and 72% for Mexican Americans. Cohabitation is the predominant union form; 59% of women cohabit at least once by age 24. Most cohabitations are short lived, with approximately one in five resulting in a marriage. We summarize the family and relationship experience of women up to age 24 in terms offour categories, each accounting for roughly a quarter of all women. Category 1 has the women who remain single nonparents. Category 2 has the early marriers, women whose marriage is not preceded by a first birth. Category 3 has those who become single parents. Category 4 has the women who cohabit at least once, but who do not marry or have a birth by age 24. The strictly ordered transitions of the 1950s are long gone and have been replaced by a variety of paths to adulthood.

This article examines whether the economic consequences of growing up in a single-parent family differ for black children and white children. It is important to understand whether the costs differ across racial groups because although much of the rhetoric about poor single-parent families focuses on inner-city blacks, most children who live in such families are white. If the costs of living with only one parent vary across groups, then policies that are aimed at reducing the costs that do not acknowledge this variation will not target resources efficiently. We found that the economic costs of living with a single parent are larger for black children than for white children. Most of the discrepancy can be attributed to differences in remarriage rates, marital stability, welfare participation, and female labor supply.

Historical demography documents that mother-only families were more common among African Americans than among Euro-Americans early in the twentieth century. We find direct evidence that African American males in both first and higher-order marriages were more likely to have (re)married previously married women and were more likely to have (re)married women with children. This racial difference in (re)marital partner choice reduced the racial difference in the prevalence of mother-only families such that, in the absence of such remarriage choices, the prevalence of mother-only families in the turn-of-the-century African American population would have been even higher than has been reported. Remarriage in this period countered the various demographic, economic, cultural, and social-institutional forces that disproportionately destabilized African American marriages; it must be taken into account more fully by analysts concerned with racial differences in family structure.