To date, the most well documented evidence of the personal and social costs of adolescent childbearing in the United States appears in Kids Having Kids (Maynard, 1997), a landmark study funded by the Robin Hood Foundation and published by the Urban Institute Press. In that volume, Rebecca Maynard, PhD, estimated that the annual cost to taxpayers of childbearing among teens aged 17 and younger was nearly $7 billion in the mid-1990s, and the cost to society as a whole was nearly twice that amount.
Policymakers, researchers, funders, private-sector leaders, and others concerned about adolescent childbearing have made excellent use of Dr. Maynard’s estimates and have frequently cited them in their own work. However, as time has passed, Dr. Maynard’s estimates have become outdated and their utility has diminished. Since Kids Having Kids was published, the economic and demographic landscape has changed, teen birth rates have declined, the welfare system has been revamped, the earned income tax credit has grown, the labor market for less-skilled workers has decreased, the unemployment rate has fallen, and average costs for housing and healthcare have increased. All of these factors, in turn, affect Dr. Maynard’s cost estimates and make a compelling case for bringing her landmark work up to date and for ensuring that these cost estimates get into the hands of those who can invest in teen pregnancy prevention.
With support from the W.T. Grant Foundation, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy worked with Dr. Saul Hoffman and Dr. Rebecca Maynard to update the national cost estimates for childbearing among adolescents aged 19 and younger, and to generate state-level cost estimates. The analysis includes the aggregate costs of teen childbearing to adolescents and their families, the public sector, and society at large. Key public sector cost components include: heath care, foster care, public assistance, criminal justice, and lost tax revenues. Dr. Hoffman prepared a user-friendly report for the National Campaign that presents the public costs of teen childbearing. We anticipate that this report will be in great demand by practitioners, policy-makers, researchers, and funders.
We have also developed state-specific materials. Specifically, the National Campaign and Dr. Hoffman created a spreadsheet to calculate the public costs of teen childbearing in each state (that is, the costs to federal, state, and local governments and the taxpayers who support them). To ensure that the spreadsheet is user-friendly and meets states’ needs, we worked with two states—Delaware and Texas—to review and refine it. The Campaign then produced a fact sheet for each state as well as charts with cost estimates for all states. We are working more intensively with a few states to promote this important new information to a variety of key audiences throughout the state such as policymakers and the media. |
Saul D. Hoffman is Professor of Economics and Department Chair at the University of Delaware, where
he has taught since 1977. He is also a Core Faculty Associate, Program in Women's Studies, University of
Delaware and a Research Associate at the Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania.
With co-author Susan Averett (Lafayette College), he is the author of a textbook Women and the Economy: Family,Work, and Pay, published by Addison Wesley.With UD colleague Larry Seidman, he is the
author of Helping Working Families: The Earned Income Tax Credit, published by the Upjohn Institute Press,
2003. The book is a major extension of their 1990 book on the EITC, The Earned Income Tax Credit: Anti-
Poverty Effectiveness and Labor Market Impacts, also published by Upjohn.
He has published extensively on the relationship between economic forces and demographic behavior,
including research on the economic consequences of divorce and of teen and non-marital childbearing and
also on the impact of the welfare system on family structure. He is the author of “Welfare: A Special Report”
in the 1995 World Book Year Book. He serves on the Effective Programs and Research Task Force of the
National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. |
