Parental Well-Being as a Mediator of Adversity: Parenting Stress and Adolescents' Academic Engagement

• In Event: 25.019 - Academic Engagement, Achievement, and Risk in Adolescence: School, Family, and Peer Predictors

Abstract

Early childhood adversity is often experienced directly by both caregiver and child, although research tends to more narrowly focus on the child. In this analysis, we test the relationship between family adversity and children’s academic engagement as mediated by maternal health. Secondary data analysis was conducted with the 2011/12 public dataset of the National Survey of Children’s Health, using a framework of parent resilience (Gavidia-Payne et al., 2015). A path model estimated for an adolescent subset, ages 12-17 (n=31,502) found that exposure to eight possible adverse experiences (e.g., divorce, parent incarcerated, domestic violence, neighborhood violence, family mental illness) was associated with poor caregiver health, which was correlated with parenting stress. Parenting stress mediated the association between adversity and academic engagement.

Authors

• Michelle V. Porche, Boston University

• Jingtong Pan, Tufts University

• Jonathan Zaff, America's Promise Alliance

• Elana R. McDermott, Tufts University