The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger

Author:Jeffrey Kluger [Kluger, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

Of all the risky behaviors siblings can share, it’s the teen-pregnancy piece of the puzzle that’s perhaps been the most studied. That’s partly because it’s a problem that’s so amenable to intervention. Avoiding temptations such as tobacco and drugs is a job that takes a lifetime, since the substances are always there—though if you make it through your teen years without ever having tried them, it’s much less likely that you ever will. But pregnancy is something that merely has to be delayed for a while—and for women who choose to marry young and have children early, the delay need not even be all that long.

The United States has done a good job of keeping its teen birthrate in check for the past generation. Currently, there are about 41.5 births per 1,000 girls in the fifteen-to-nineteen age group. That represents a decline of more than 20 percent in some demographic subsets from 1991 to 2005. The rate ticked up about 3 percent from 2006 to 2008, giving epidemiologists a few nervous moments, but it has resumed its downward trajectory since. The reasons for the happy trend are no secret: better public awareness, improved availability of contraception, and a general shift in the zeitgeist that has made delayed sex—if not complete premarital abstinence—a more fashionable choice among teens than it used to be.

Patricia East of the University of California, San Diego, has been a leader in the field of kids, sibs, and risk behavior, and much of her focus has gone to pregnancy, particularly in the Hispanic and African American communities, where the rate of motherhood among teens is generally higher than in the broader population. A great deal of this increased incidence is due to lower income and reduced educational opportunities, but family dynamics also play a role, and East and her colleagues set out to investigate that part of the puzzle. Tracking 127 volunteer girls over a six-year period, they focused principally on the influence of the two most powerful female figures in the girls’ lives—their mothers and their older sisters. Some of the subject girls’ moms had been teen mothers; some of their sisters had; in some cases the family had no history of teen pregnancy. The influence these differing backgrounds had was powerful—and unmistakable.

Girls in East’s study with an older sister who had a baby as a teenager were 4.8 times—or 480 percent—likelier to become pregnant in their teen years themselves. If a girl’s mother and sister had both been teen moms, the figure rose a bit higher, to 5.1, or 510 percent. But if her mother alone had had a baby in her teens and her sister had not, the younger sister’s risk rose by just .2, or 20 percent—significant but not startling. The study suggested a lot of explanations for the results, some more obvious than others.

For one thing, to an adolescent daughter, what happens in a mother’s teen years is long-ago history. It’s something she wasn’t around to witness herself, which dramatically diminishes its impact.

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