Teenage Mothers’ Health across Different Life Stages*

This paper determines the role of teenage motherhood and the likely channels through which teenage motherhood contributes to lifetime health disparities between teenage mothers and other women. We apply fixed‐effects regressions, including a broad range of background characteristics, to control for prior disadvantage associated with teenage motherhood. We find that teenage motherhood is negatively associated with both mental and physical health and that the impacts worsen in later life stages. We identify several mediating factors that partly explain the impact of teenage motherhood for mental health; the strongest pathways are through social support, family and economic outcomes.