Life Satisfaction Among Teenage Parents

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Life Satisfaction has been broadly described as reflecting a cognitive judgment of one 's life as a whole. Psychologists have long incorporated the construct of Life Satisfaction as a means of studying adults (Suldo & Huebner, 2004). Recently, in the field of psychology there has been a call to expand the focus of Life Satisfaction to teenage parents (Huebner & Gilman, 2002). To date, no research has been conducted assessing Life Satisfaction in adolescent fathers and mothers. Measuring Life Satisfaction across different domains is useful because it may inform customized interventions targeting specific life domains in which the mother, father and the children would most greatly benefit. There has been a strong emphasis on the challenges of parenthood (Crittendon 2001) which imply that for many men …show more content…

A profile of an adolescent father shows that he is young, he is part of an unplanned pregnancy (Benson, 2004; Hacker, et al., 2000), he is not married to the child’s mother, and not living with the mother and child. Research on adolescent and non-resident father involvement shows that there are both internal and external factors that influence father involvement, thus decreasing their life satisfaction. Internally, fathers determine some of their involvement in care and daily activities by their perception of the father role and how they see themselves fit into that role (Goodman, 2004). Externally, fathers are influenced by the relationship they have with the child’s mother and whether the mother believes he is capable of assisting in parenting responsibilities (Fagan and Barnett, 2003; Herzog, Umaña-Taylor, Madden-Derdich, & Leonard, 2007; Knoester, Petts & Eggebeen, 2007; McBride, Brown, Bost, Shin, Vaughn, & Korth,

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