Precursors of Mild Mental Retardation in Children with Adolescent Mothers

Publisher Summary This chapter presents data that focuses on development during middle childhood for children born to adolescent mothers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A prospective analysis of children's development enabled to understand the effects of early parenting, in combination with other maternal personal, social, and emotional factors, on the emergence of mental retardation and other developmental delays. The chapter briefly describes the Notre Dame Adolescent Parenting Project and then summarizes major developmental patterns through age 5. It presents maternal and child data related to the emergence of “early signs” of mild mental retardation and learning disabilities, tracing children's developmental trajectories for intelligence, language, adaptive behaviors, and adjustment for the entire sample as well as for children who at age 10 showed delays in intelligence and adaptation. The chapter also presents data on the role of parenting in helping to explain developmental delays, emphasizing new findings on the interrelationships between maternal and child developmental trajectories. In the concluding part of the chapter, three interrelated explanations are offered regarding factors that might influence children's developmental delays: disorganized attachment, failures to teach and model self-regulation skills, and neglectful-abusive parenting.