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Journal Article In this special issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, a broad range of review papers provides insight into important themes and issues regarding the complexity of operationalizing community-wide initiatives’ overall vision. Presented together from different vantage points, these papers capture the challenges and opportunities at the local community level to approach teen pregnancy prevention from a comprehensive perspective that includes education, health services, and community engagement. Several cross-cutting themes provide insights that can help the next generation of programs.
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Journal Article Although the gender gap may be slowly closing across generations, men are generally much more likely than women to develop a substance use disorder as they move through adolescence into early to middle adulthood when most men first become a father. Research done from several different perspectives suggests that substance use by men affects family relations and family relations affect substance use by men, undoubtedly in a reciprocal manner as men move through the life cycle of the family. Moreover, substance use by men represents a substantial threat to the development of infants, toddlers…
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Journal Article Although several systematic reviews have addressed the antecedents and consequences of adolescent motherhood, none have examined adolescent fatherhood.
The aims of this systematic review were to identify evidence-based factors that increase the probability of adolescent fatherhood and to identify outcomes that differ between adolescent fathers compared to two other groups, namely adult fathers and non-father age peers. The current study used a theoretical framework, Parke's systems view, to guide the review.
A total of 2869 unique published sources were screened and 39 met…
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Journal Article Despite a large body of literature across multiple disciplines on adolescent motherhood, adolescent fathers have been largely absent from empirical research. Previous findings suggest that young men who experience multiple risk factors across a range of life domains have a high likelihood of becoming fathers at an early age, which can negatively impact their developmental trajectories and age-normative transitions (e.g. from school to work). However, little is known about the risk factors for fatherhood among high-risk juvenile offenders; nor is it well understood how fatherhood is related…
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Journal Article Literature in developmental psychology suggests that mothers and fathers both play unique and important roles in their children’s development. However, research investigating the unique contributions and psychological functioning of fathers of youth with developmental disabilities, and the role that fathers play in effective intervention, remains limited. Whereas evidence suggests that parent-mediated interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can lead to increased engagement from parents, and reduced stress and psychopathology commonly experienced by parents of youth with…
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Journal Article Lower baseline testosterone (T) among men is generally associated with more sympathetic and nurturant responses to infant stimuli. The effect of exposure to infant crying on men’s levels of T, however, is not well understood. The present study aimed to measure men’s T responses to high and low levels of infant crying. Changes in fathers’ (n = 18) and non-fathers’ (n = 28) salivary T levels from baseline were measured in response to caring for an infant simulator programmed to cry often (high-demand condition) or infrequently (low-demand condition) during a 20-min caregiving simulation. Men…
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Journal Article The aim of the Baby Elmo Program is to establish a low-cost, sustainable parenting and structured visitation program for non-custodial incarcerated teen parents. The program is taught and supervised by probation staff in juvenile detention facilities and unlike traditional programs, this intervention is not based on increasing the teen's abstract parenting knowledge, but rather in building a relationship between the teen and his child. The sessions target the interactional quality of the relationship by introducing relationship, communication, and socio-emotional enhancing techniques.…
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Journal Article The majority of teen pregnancy literature and practice is deficit based, focusing on the consequences of teen pregnancy; significantly less research is devoted to the teens’ strengths. This article discusses the strengths-based perspective as a viable framework for clinicians and school social workers to implement to help teen parents and their families ameliorate some of the challenges they encounter. This article emphasizes the importance of clinicians, school social workers, and the community to adopt a strengths-based perspective when working with teen parents in order to cultivate…
Unpublished Paper
Drawing on an extended longitudinal study of the lived experiences and support needs of young fathers, this working paper follows the fortunes of 31 young men through the process of becoming a parent. The paper begins with some reflections on the nature of existing evidence on young fathers. In 2010, at the outset of our study, we discovered a paradox in researching this topic. On the one hand, young fathers had been neglected in social scientific research and marginalized in policy discourses and in professional practice (see Neale 2016, Neale and Davies 2015 and for parallel developments in…
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Journal Article In the second half of the 20th century, the United States experienced a massive increase in incarceration. In response to this growth, a burgeoning scholarship has sought to explore the collateral consequences of incarceration for young children. However, this scholarship has less frequently explored the impact of incarceration on long-term outcomes, how incarceration experienced in periods other than early childhood impacts children, and whether the incarceration of family members other than parents has negative implications for children. Using data from the children of the mothers in the…
