If you’ve got a nagging mom, you’re more likely to become more successful later in life. That’s right, behind every successful girl is a nagging mom.
That’s according to a study by researchers at the University of Essex in England.
In the study, the researchers looked into 15,500 schoolgirls, ages 13 and 14, in England from 2004 to 2010. Based on the database, they found that teen girls with pushy mothers are more likely to go to college, earn more money, be less likely to be jobless, partner with successful mates and be less likely to become pregnant outside marriage.
The researchers pointed out that the benefit of parental pressure was most evident among the least academic teenagers, who don’t have teachers or friends to encourage them.
“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,” researcher Ericka Rascon-Ramirez suggested.
The study, which was presented to the Royal Economic Society Conference, also found something quite obvious: that mothers appeared to be the parent with the greatest nagging power.
Moreover, the results of the study suggest that parents with high expectations could reduce a teenage girl’s chances of becoming pregnant compared to those whose parents only had “middling aspirations”.
“What our parents expected about our school choices was, very likely, a major determinant of our decision about conceiving a child or not during our teenage years,” Rascon-Ramirez added.
How to Prevent Teenage Pregnancy
Teenage pregnancy is a high contributor to high school dropout rates, lower school achievement, more health problems, higher risk of incarceration and unemployment as a young adult. Here are some tips to prevent teenage pregnancy, a socially, physically, emotionally and economically complex issue.
- Abstinence from sex
- Use of contraceptives
- Overcome parent-child communication barriers