Predictors of resiliency in adolescent mothers

The adaptation of adolescent mothers to challenges encountered by early chi ldbearing is characterized by much diversity. The focus of the current rese arch was to identify protective factors at the time of the initial pregnanc y that predispose the young mother to resiliency. These factors were used a s predictor variables in a stepwise discriminatory model to categorize 103 early childbearers as resilient or vulnerable 5 years after the birth of th eir first child. Six variables accounted for 46% of the variance between th e resilient and vulnerable mothers. Resilient adolescents had completed mor e schooling at the time of the pregnancy, were relatively younger, had more support from friends and siblings, more empathic parenting attitudes, and somewhat lower verbal intelligence scores than their vulnerable counterpart s. The linear discriminant function based on these six variables was then a pplied to an independent sample of 26 adolescent mothers. The function corr ectly classified 67% of the vulnerable mothers and 92% of the resilient mot hers. Implications for more focused interventions with pregnant adolescents are discussed.