Key to your teenage daughter’s success? It’s pushy parenting

GET tough with a teenage daughter and she’s likely to slam her bedroom door in protest.

But console yourself that it’s worth it in the end – because being a pushy parent is the best way to prepare her for success, say researchers.

Setting high standards means adolescent girls are less likely to become pregnant and suffer the setbacks in life that go with being a teenage mum, they found.

They also have more chance of going to university and are less likely to be unemployed or earn poor wages when they do get a job.

The University of Essex study said the benefit of pushy parents was most marked among the least academic teenagers, who often have no friends or teachers willing to encourage them.

Researcher Ericka Rascon-Ramirez said: ‘In many cases we succeeded in doing what we believed was more convenient for us, even when this was against our parents’ will. But no matter how hard we tried to avoid our parents’ recommendations, it is likely that they ended up influencing, in a more subtle manner, choices that we had considered extremely personal.

‘What our parents expected about our school choices was, very likely, a major determinant of our decisions about conceiving a child or not during our teenage years.’

The study, which studied the lives of schoolgirls aged 13 and 14 from a database of 15,500 pupils, said mothers appeared to be the parent with the greatest nagging power.

‘The measure of expectations in this study reflects a combination of aspirations and beliefs about the likelihood of attending higher education reported by the main par- ent, who, in the majority of cases, is the mother,’ it said.

The findings, presented to the conference of the Royal Economic Society, reveal how parents with high expectations can reduce a teenager’s chance of becoming pregnant by four per cent compared to parents with ‘middling aspirations’.

It added that despite falls in teenage pregnancy rates over the past four years, Britain still has the highest rate of adolescent motherhood in Europe.

It called on politicians and officials to try new ways to tackle it by ‘increasing educational choices and expectations’.

Teenage motherhood means girls are likely to leave school early and earn less than others if they get jobs, the report said. They also face higher chances of forming relationships with ‘poorly educated and unemployment-prone men’.

Children of teenage mothers are more likely to have chronic health problems like obesity, do badly at school, become teen mothers themselves and end up poor earners.

The report also highlighted the failure of Labour’s teenage pregnancy strategy, launched in 1999 by Tony Blair. Although it offered information on relationships, sex and contraception, it did not highlight ‘socio-economic factors’ that are associated with the problem, said the report.

Rapid falls in teen pregnancy rates have been recorded since the Coalition axed the programme in 2010.

Nagging power

of mothers