Adolescent childbearing and schooling in Latin America and the Caribbean: Using population data to demystify a demographic puzzle of continuity and change

Adolescent childbearing in Latin America and the Caribbean is a demographic puzzle. High rates of teenage childbearing in the region exceed global trends when compared against countries with similar development profiles. Additionally, the region’s high levels of adolescent fertility have persisted over the region’s dramatic schooling expansion, which usually occurs alongside postponements to entry into motherhood. This thesis examines patterns of continuity and change in adolescent childbearing in Latin America and the Caribbean through a collection of three research papers. The research begins with a broad, aggregate view and narrows progressively into smaller geographic areas and more nuanced relationships. The first paper looks at country-level educational differentials in parity-specific adolescent fertility in six countries over the last half-century. It explores the high-level picture of long-term, parity-specific trends in a diverse set of countries from Central and South America and the Caribbean. Namely, it looks at Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico and Peru. The analysis offers a comprehensive demographic accounting of how the region has maintained such high levels of adolescent fertility in the face of dramatic schooling improvements. The second paper narrows focus onto adolescent childbearing trends in Mexico over the last quarter-century. The paper estimates municipal age- and parity-specific adolescent fertility levels, and examines patterns of subnational variation, which reveal considerable and important differences that have heretofore remained unseen. Importantly, the study highlights the childbearing trends of the youngest adolescents (those 14 years and younger) for whom estimates have not been seen before. The third paper dives deep into Mexico as a case study to look at the individual adolescent girl, and how the broader context around her shapes her risk of entering motherhood in adolescence. The analysis focuses on evidence for the changing importance of context over the adolescent age schedule. That is, after accounting for individual characteristics that are markers for adolescent fertility risk (such as school dropout), it examines whether the broader childbearing patterns of a girl’s adolescent peers matter for her likelihood of having a first or second birth in adolescence—and whether the importance of context changes in magnitude at distinct adolescent ages. The three papers shed important light on the puzzle of adolescent childbearing in Latin America and the Caribbean by unpacking trends into schooling-or parity-specific patterns and investigating trends among the youngest adolescents. Together, the studies bring needed visibility to childbearing patterns among the region’s youngest and most vulnerable mothers