Adolescents' Pregnancy Intentions, Wantedness, and Regret: Cross‐Lagged Relations With Mental Health and Harsh Parenting

Abstract

The authors used cross-lagged analyses to examine the across-time influences on and consequences of adolescents’ pregnancy intentions, wantedness, and regret. One hundred pregnant Latina adolescents were studied during pregnancy and at 6 and 12 months postpartum. The results revealed 4 main findings: (a) similar to what has been found in adult women, adolescents’ lower prenatal pregnancy intendedness and wantedness predicted initial difficulties in parenting; (b) frequent depression symptoms predicted subsequent lower pregnancy intendedness and wantedness; (c) adolescents’ poor mental health and harsh parenting of their child predicted subsequent higher childbearing regret, and (d) high childbearing regret and parenting stress were reciprocally related across time. In addition, adolescents’ wantedness of their pregnancy declined prenatally to postbirth, and strong pregnancy intendedness and wantedness were not concurrently related to adolescents’ poor prenatal mental health. The findings reveal how adolescents’ thoughts and feelings about their pregnancies are influenced by and predictive of their mental health and parenting experiences.

Pregnancy Intention and Post-partum Depressive Affect in Louisiana Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System

“…The most accurate measures of pregnancy intention are prospective and are multi-faceted [19,[65][66][67], and ideally based on data from both the mother and father. Women with low birth weight or preterm infants, may be more likely to indicate lower levels of pregnancy intention than women with healthy, full-term babies [68].…”

“…In Louisiana alone, 58 % of all pregnancies are unintended-72 % of those are mistimed, and 28 % are unwanted [5]. Younger (aged [18][19][20][21][22][23][24], unmarried (particularly cohabiting), low-income, minority women and women who have not completed high school are more likely to have an unintended pregnancy [6].…”

“…While the relationship between pregnancy intention and infant health outcomes has been well documented, few studies address the impact of unintended pregnancies on maternal physical and mental health, such as postpartum depression (PPD) [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

Teenage Mothers Today: What We Know and How It Matters

“…The tendency for statistical methods to focus on average effects has obscured potential differences in how teenage motherhood shapes young people's lives. For example, the emotional and mental health consequences of teenage motherhood depend in part on whether the pregnancy was intended or wanted . Teenage mothers' emotional and mental health after childbearing can also depend on social location (e.g., the negative impact of discrimination and the protective role of affirmation of ethnic identity among Mexican‐origin teenage mothers; ).…”

An implicit ambivalence-indifference dimension of childbearing desires in the National Survey of Family Growth

“…What we need in the future are more longitudinal, cross-lagged modeling studies like that of East, Chien, and Barber (2012) that examine how the flow of feelings during the course of getting pregnant, being pregnant, and having a baby affect the mother's mental state, her parenting behavior, and her other relationships and overall functioning. At an even more basic level, what we need are studies that test for the presence, direction, and magnitude of retrospective bias by means of time-since-pregnancy studies.…”