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Abstract
Based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Supplement (NLSY-CS), this study follows a cohort of young children of teenage mothers through the early childhood, and tracks the association between developmental resources and child resilience. The specific question motivating this thesis are: (1) under what circumstances or conditions (multiple conditions) are children of teenage mothers able to overcome adversity? and (2) How do these factors play out over time to promote child resilience?
Three major theories are employed to offer interdisciplinary insights on the search for the answers. Resilience Theory points out the importance of individual traits such as competence and self-efficacy to enable children to maneuver their way out of economic and social disadvantage. Social Capital Theory underscores the importance of family structure and process resources and social networks in the communities in promoting successful development among disadvantaged children. Limited Difference Theory stresses the importance of interactions between external support and individual reactions and their cumulative effects on positive growth. A novel Boolean-logic methodology is used to identify and distill the essential features of a complex array of developmental resources that are associated with the successful pathways of resilient children of teenage mothers.
Results of the present study suggest that there is not an average pathway to success for the resilient children of teenage mothers; rather, these children utilize different resource packages and thrive accordingly: some have more social capital, others possess more internal strength. Second, cognitive resilience and behavioral resilience capture two distinct areas in children's welfare. Whereas cognitive resilience requires both genetic endowment and provision of learning experience, behavioral resilience is largely a product of high levels of social support, e.g., father's involvement, mother's warmth. Third, the quantitative comparisons of frequencies of generic pathways indicate that the life experience of the resilient children of teenage mothers are distinct from the vulnerable children to a great extent.
