The Impact of Early Maternal Age on Early Childhood Mortality: Evidence from Egypt

We investigate the relationship between early maternal age (teen motherhood) and early childhood mortality. Existing work shows that negative selection into teen motherhood is crucial in understanding its consequences on women and their offspring. Even without these selection effects, there are reasons to believe that children born in their mother’s adolescence are disadvantaged, given their mother’s physical and psychological immaturity. We use Egyptian data in a mother fixed effects framework to examine the effect of early maternal age on early childhood mortality. By comparing mortality outcomes of children born to the same mother at different maternal ages, we control for all mother-level child-invariant characteristics. The results show that a child born to an adolescent mother is more likely to die in neonatal, infant, and childhood periods than a sibling born in their mother’s adulthood. The adverse effect doubles if a child is born before a mother’s sixteenth birthday, which is not uncommon in the data. We show that children born to a young mother are more likely to be below average size at birth, and their mother is less likely to receive prenatal care than when pregnant with siblings born in her adulthood. That hints that the biological disadvantage associated with early childbearing may explain the toll of early childhood mortality.