Longitudinal Patterns of Caregiving Sensitivity in a Sample of Adolescent Mothers

Adolescent mothers are at a heightened risk of experiencing adversity (e.g., financial insecurity) that may influence the patterns of their caregiving sensitivity across time. Ample research has focused on child outcomes related to caregiving sensitivity; however, less literature exists identifying the patterns of change and/or consistency across time, specifically amongst at-risk samples. Thus, the current study examined longitudinal patterns of parenting sensitivity in a sample of adolescent mothers.

Participants included 162 adolescent mothers and their first-born children from the midwestern and southeastern United States drawn from the Notre Dame Adolescent Parenting Project (NDAPP). Maternal sensitivity was measured when children were 6 months, 1-, 3-, and 5-years of age via researcher observation.

Growth mixture modeling revealed that a one-class model was the best fit for the data, and that the slope of maternal sensitivity across timepoints was significant and positive. That is, mothers in general improved in sensitivity across time and no subgroups with differing trajectories emerged.

Mothers showed similar increases in their parenting sensitivity across time. It may have been that patterns of sensitivity were largely homologous because mothers came from comparable backgrounds and therefore navigated the transition into parenthood and childrearing in similar ways. Findings from this study also bring focus to adolescent mothers' improvement in parenting sensitivity across time. Such results aid in further reducing stigma associated with adolescent motherhood by highlighting their similarity to adult parent samples.