A new report reveals that the level of education a mother has attained, directly affects the academic success of her children.

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan who looked at the educational achievements of mothers and the aptitude of their children upon entering kindergarten in 1998 until the Spring of 2007.

14,279 cases were involved in the study and the grades of the children in Reading and Math were collected when they were grades three, five, and eight, in addition to annual interviews.



The researchers found that children of mothers ages 19 and over entered the school system in kindergarten with higher levels of academic achievement and continued to succeed throughout their schooling years. By contrast, children of younger mothers ages 18 and below did not fare as well as their counterparts. On the bright side, the children of teen mothers who are able to complete their education do show improvement over the children of mothers who are unable to continue going to school. Unfortunately, these children still are unable to catch up to the levels of children whose mothers finish high school and university. The revelations of the study, according to lead researcher Sandra Tang, show the importance of academic achievement in relation to a mother's educational attainment. "Given that growth in achievement generally stays the same across time for math and reading for all children in the sample, these patterns highlight the importance of investing in early interventions that target adolescent mothers and provide them with the skills needed to promote their children's learning," she said. The study was published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence and used data gathered from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. The paper was co-authored by Holly Sexton, a University of Texas researcher, and Meichu Chen, a researcher from the ISR's Research Center for Group Dynamics.

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