Motherhood in adolescence and early adulthood is seen as a significant risk factor both for the development of the infant and for the subsequent developmental trajectories of the mother. The infants of adolescent mothers have a greater probability of having insecure and disorganized attachment to their mothers in childhood (Broussard, 1995, Flaherty and Sadler, 2011, Frodi et al., 1990, Moran et al., 2008, van IJzendoorn et al., 1999 and Ward and Carlson, 1995), less stability in attachment from early to middle childhood (1–5 years) (Lounds, Borkowski, Thomas, Maxwell, & Weed, 2005), a greater probability of suffering abuse (Bolton, 1990) and of having behaviour problems, poor academic achievement and delays in cognitive and linguistic development (Moffitt, 2002, Oxford and Spieker, 2006, Pomerleau et al., 2003 and Rafferty et al., 2011). In adolescence and adulthood they display a range of adverse outcomes, such as early school leaving, poor academic achievement, unemployment, early parenthood, and violent offending (Hoffman and Maynard, 2008, Jaffee et al., 2001a and Meade et al., 2008). Early motherhood, at the same time, limits the subsequent life opportunities of the young women (Jaffee, Caspi, Moffitt, Taylor, & Dickson, 2001), leading them to have a low level of education and being underemployed and giving rise to a higher probability of suffering depression (Boden et al., 2008 and Horwitz et al., 1996) and having substance abuse problems in adulthood (Moffitt, 2002).
The double risk, for mother and infant, inherent in adolescent motherhood, is linked to the fact that adolescent mothers have to simultaneously tackle potentially conflicting developmental tasks: the transition to adulthood, involving separation and individuation from parental figures, and to parenthood, involving the nurturing of an infant and caring for his physical and emotional needs (Aiello and Lancaster, 2007 and Fraiberg, 1978). This may create strong conflict in the young mother between her need for autonomy and the infant's intense dependency on her, giving rise to depression, parenting stress and low self-esteem and also affecting her ways of relating to and nurturing the infant (Osofsky et al., 1993, Reid and Meadows-Oliver, 2007, Secco et al., 2007 and Slade et al., 2005).
At the same time cognitive and neurophysiological development in adolescent and young adult mothers still has to be completed (Giedd, 2005 and Steinberg, 2005). Such immaturity may be an obstacle for the young mother when she is making choices as to which methods of parenting to adopt with her infant. Mothers under 20 are also less cognitively competent with regard to taking on their parental role (cognitive readiness to parent) and to knowledge of the stages of development of their infants (Whitman, Borkowski, Keogh, & Weed, 2001).
To sum up, the research shows, confirming initial hypotheses, that the dyads with adolescent mothers are less adequate than the dyads with adult mothers at the level of both individual behaviour as shown by various studies (Barnard, 1997, Easterbrooks et al., 2005, Osofsky et al., 1992 and Rafferty et al., 2011), and dyadic emotion regulation, something which was not found in previous research. The study also shows the role of the infant, demonstrating how in adolescent mother dyads the infants express negative emotions more than the infants of adult mothers. Previous research, on the other hand, demonstrated only the hostile and intrusive behaviour of the mothers.
The longer duration of negative match states and the shorter duration of positive matched states may point to the greater difficulty in regulating negative emotions which is found in adolescent mother dyads. This data has some features in common with another risk factor for mother–infant emotion regulation, i.e. post-partum depression. Similarly, Infant Neutral/Mother Negative, Infant Positive/Mother Negative mismatches have been identified, as we have seen, by various studies, as emotion incoherence emerging in the context of disrupted communications. The difficulty in regulating negative emotions observed in the adolescent mother dyads in the first months of the infant's life could also explain the greater frequency of episodes of abuse of the infants of adolescent mothers during infancy and also the higher percentage of potential child abuse (Whitman et al., 2001 and Zuravin and Di Blasio, 1996) observed in adolescent mothers.
