Consequences of Teen Parents' Child Care Arrangements for Mothers and Children.

Using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (2001 - 2006; N ≈ 7900), we examined child care arrangements among teen parents from birth through prekindergarten. Four latent classes of child care arrangements at 9, 24, and 52 months emerged: "parental care," "center care," "paid home-based care," and "free kin-based care." Disadvantaged teen-parent families were overrepresented in the "parental care" class, which was negatively associated with children's preschool reading, math, and behavior scores and mothers' socioeconomic and fertility outcomes compared to some nonparental care classes. Nonparental care did not predict any negative maternal or child outcomes, and different care arrangements had different benefits for mothers and children. Time spent in nonparental care and improved maternal outcomes contributed to children's increased scores across domains. Child care classes predicted maternal outcomes similarly in teen-parent and nonteen-parent families, but the "parental care" class predicted some disproportionately negative child outcomes for teen-parent families.