Adolescent Childbearing and Upward Mobility: Exploring the parenting experience of young mothers in a parent support program in Mexico

The purpose of this trip was to learn about the ongoing evaluation of a parenting program intervention in Mexico and to interview program participants to understand the experience of motherhood among adolescent mothers in this program. This research operates within the existing evaluation of a parenting education program, Educacion Inicial (EI), ongoing in Mexico. The aim of the existing evaluation is to determine the impact of participation in Educacion Inicial on child growth and development. The aim of this sub-study is to understand the parenting experience of adolescent mothers as participants in the Educacion Inicial intervention. During the first week, I met with our partners at the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Cuernavaca to learn about the child development tests used in data collection, process evaluation results, including quality of the parenting education sessions and preliminary outcomes after three years of operation. I then spent three weeks in the field where I conducted 30 interviews with program participants to understand their experiences as mothers and how the parenting program has influenced their parenting. The results will provide a rich qualitative context to quantitative analyses looking at the impact of adolescent motherhood on child development in this population.