children under 18, 31 percent of Hispanic families with children, and 54 percent of African American families with children(Bureau of the Census 1999a:62). The lives of single parents and their children are not inevitably more difficult than life in a traditional nuclear family. It is asinaccu rate to assume that a single-paren family is necessarily"deprived" as it is to assume that a two-parent fam ily is always secure and happy. Nevertheless, life in a single-parent family can be extremely stressful, in both economic and emotional terms. A family headed by a single mother faces especially difficult problems when the mother is a teenager. Even though teenage pregnancy rates declined during the 1990s, teenagers in the United States still become pregnant, give birth, and have abortions at much higher rates than adolescents in almost any other industrialized nation. Many