Women have always become mothers during their teenage years. However, in most industrialized countries, marriage preceded the baby carriage. Few births to young women occurred in the absence of marriage. Even when an unmarried girl became pregnant, societal norms and parental sanctions usually resulted in a hasty marriage (what was termed a shotgun marriage because the man who got a young woman pregnant was forced to marry her). Consequently, when a young woman did become pregnant, marriage would precede (by a few months) or quickly follow the child' birth. The rhyme quoted above that young girls in the United States chant when jumping rope was almost a universal fact of life.

Over the past 40 years a dramatic change in the context of teenage childbearing has occurred. In 1960, 40% of girls were married by the age of 19 compared with 15% in 1986. In 1960, 15% of all teenage births were to unmarried girls. In 1995, 75% of teenage births occurred out of wedlock (Ventura, Martin, Curtin, & Matthews, 1997). An examination of the rates of unwed teenage births across different ethnicity and race categories in 1995 has revealed that, for Blacks, the rate was 95%, whereas it was 68% for Whites and 67% for Latinos. Thus, the context of teenage childbearing has shifted from marital to nonmarital. At the same time, marriage and childbearing ages have increased over the past two decades for middle-class youth, although not for poorer youth (Cherlin, 1992; Rosenheim & Testa, 1992).