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Hard On Your Heart: A Qualitative Description Of Adolescent Prenatal Stress, Candace Clayton Knight

All ETDs from UAB

Introduction: Pregnancy during adolescence is potentially stressful due to the concurrent tasks of navigating the typically tumultuous adolescent stage of development and the life altering experience of pregnancy (Kaye, 2008). There is a growing body of research linking prenatal stress to poor birth and developmental outcomes such as premature birth and low birth weight infants (K. Keenan, Sheffield, & Boeldt, 2007; Mulder et al., 2002), which makes describing the relatively unexplored perceptions and experience of stress during adolescent pregnancy important. The life course framework, with its emphasis on social, environmental, and family risk factors, has implications for reducing disparities among …