Teenage parenthood, circumstances and educational mobility of children

This paper focuses on teenage childbearing, a phenomenon that is often linked to poverty, restricted education, and cultural and social norms. Teenage parenthood can hinder educational goals, resulting in low income and social exclusion. Through an examination of Italian census data, this paper analyzes the effects of unequal opportunities caused by teenage childbearing of parents on intergenerational educational mobility, finding that increasing parents’ age at the conception of the first child is associated with higher upward educational mobility among their children. As a consequence, children whose parents had experienced early pregnancies between the ages of 12 and 18 have low upward mobility with respect to their peers and are unable to overcome their parents’ educational attainment