Prenatal Care: The Adolescent's Perspective.

Certified childbirth educators have the ideal preparation for prenatal education, but they likely need to enhance their approach for adolescent clients. First, young mothers in the United States are presenting with increasingly diverse backgrounds, requiring cultural awareness of childbirth educators and others who wish to effectively meet their prenatal health care and education needs. In addition, adolescents who become pregnant are an extremely vulnerable group and, therefore, require special concern. Pregnant adolescents are unique from other groups of pregnant women in all major aspects of assessment: their social environment; their personal, social, and psychological development; and their physical response. Therefore, prenatal care and childbirth education designed for the typical population are unlikely to best serve the pregnant adolescent.