Efficancy of a parenting component in a teen parent program in Broward County, Florida

This study took place during the 1990-1991 school year and involved 58 pregnant and parenting teenage participants between 14 and 19 years of age living in north Broward County, Florida. It evaluated the effectiveness of a parenting program by comparing performance of two groups on the Adult and Adolescent Parenting Inventory (AAPI). The experimental group consisted of 39 (out of a potential pool of 139) public high school students. The 39 students of the study completed one full semester at a special center. The study's control group consisted of 19 teen parents who were non-treatment participants with similar demographic and descriptive profiles. The study also determined which of the subject variables of home environment, age, parenting status, reading level, and grades earned in coursework were correlated significantly with experimental group posttest performance in the AAPI's constructs of empathy, expectations, physical punishment, role modeling, and with a composite total score. Using analysis of variance (ANOVAS), there were no differences on three constructs (empathy, physical punishment and role modeling) between the experimental and control groups. Significant differences between groups were found in the parental expectation and total composite construct. Stepwise regression was used with Florida Atlantic University's Vax using SPSSX for correlations of independent variables with experimental group posttest performance. The parental expectations construct was not significantly correlated with any independent variables. Significantly correlated variables at the.05 level included the "Child Development" class grade with the dependent variables of posttest total composite score, physical punishment, and role modeling. At the.01 level, the "Child Development" grade also significantly correlated with the empathy posttest score. The reading level was significantly correlated with the empathy and physical punishment constructs. Treatment/control group long-term performance paralleled research indicating that participation in programs designed to offer support to teenage mothers was related to positive caregiving styles (Dunst, Vance, & Cooper, 1986). Brooks-Gunn (1991) also found that second-generation teen parents who had been participants in parenting programs were likely to have attained higher levels of education and to have had fewer of their children taken from them 17 years later (Brooks-Gunn, 1991).