Early Motherhood in Romania: Associated Factors and Consequences

Mihaela Hărăguş, Babes-Bolyai University

Our aim is to investigate the early childbearing in Romania in a life course perspective, studying to what extent the context and experiences of woman’s childhood influence the timing of her childbearing behavior. We consider in the analysis the effects of personal characteristics, too. We also analyze whether having a birth before age 20 is associated with particular disadvantages in subsequent adult life. We conduct our investigation on data from Generations and Gender Survey (Romania 2005), which contains retrospective information about 6000 women' partnership and fertility histories and the context of their childhood. Our results indicate that women who grew up in more disadvantaged family environments show higher risks of early childbearing, and the educational enrollment/attainment have a marked influence on early childbearing risk. We also found that having had an early birth previous in life is associated with several adverse socioeconomic and family life outcomes in adult life.