Worldwide research on fertility in the second decade of life has shown that young mothers complete fewer years of schooling than their nulliparous age peers and women who postpone their first childbirth until age 20 or later. In Brazil, few studies have identified the extent to which these gaps were already present before fertility. Thus, it is difficult to assess the real effect of pregnancy and fertility on young mothers’ education. This paper comprises an analysis of the educational progress of a representative sample (n = 225) of young women living in Campinas, a municipality of one million inhabitants in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. All individuals in the sample had their first live-born child between the ages of 17 and 19 in 2005 and were interviewed between 2006 and 2007. Their schooling histories from age seven to 16 (when all were still nulliparous) were then reconstituted longitudinally by the use of retrospective questions. The high incidence of academic failures and interruptions in studies prior to the subjects’ pregnancies and first live births indicates that many of them had encountered obstacles in their schooling career before fertility: 28.0% failed and dropped out while 78.2% failed or dropped out of at least one school grade before pregnancy and their first live birth. Thus, cross-sectional studies that analyze the schooling deficits of young mothers only after their first pregnancy or childbirth and directly compare them to the school achievements of childless women-or those who delayed their first childbirth after the age of 20-may not properly identify the origins of age-school grade gaps and the few years of schooling completed.
Adolescent fertility; Teenage pregnancy; Age-school grade gap
