Families and Poverty: Examining Associations Between Family- and Community-Level Factors

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Family Context & Processes

Abstract

Poverty and its proxies are powerful variables related to many negative outcomes in cognitive development (e.g., Heckman, 2006), socioemotional development (e.g., Conger & Donnellan, 2007; Grant et al., 2003), and health (e.g., Miller, Chen, & Parker, 2011). When examining factors at the family level, families living in poverty often face instability and disorganization due to non-regular work hours and unreliable transportation (i.e., household chaos; Evans et al., 2005; Evans & Wachs, 2010; Vernon-Feagans et al., 2012). Indeed, household chaos has also been found to be negatively associated with children’s cognitive and socioemotional development (e.g., Deater-Deckard et al., 2009). When examining community-level factors, parents living in disadvantaged communities report higher levels of stress than parents in more affluent neighborhoods (Franco, Pottick, & Huang, 2010). Overall, household and community-level hardships experienced by families in poverty often exacerbate parenting difficulties (Edin & Lein, 1997; Magnuson & Duncan, 2002), and parenting stress is tied to poor health in parents, negative child behaviors, and the use of negative parenting strategies (Crnic & Low, 2002; Deater-Deckard, 2004). Thus, including different ecological levels of contextual factors is important when examining parent and child variables because families are surrounded by a nest of cultural systems within the family (e.g., household chaos) and outside of the family (e.g., disadvantages at the community level) that impacts day-to-day life (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006).

The purpose of the present study was to investigate reciprocal prospective relationships among child emotion regulation, parent well-being, parenting strategies, household chaos, and community concentrated disadvantage in families from low-income backgrounds at the beginning (T1) and end (T2) of their children’s preschool year. Specifically, we examined these variables in a sample of 466 Head Start families using a cross-lagged panel design. Cross-lagged panels provide advantages over traditional regression, such as the assessment of the stability of variables and the relative strength of associations across time (McCoy, Roy, & Sirkman, 2013). Concentrated disadvantage at the community level, assessed via a composite of poverty, public assistance, unemployment, female-headed households with children, and African Americans (Klein, 2011; Morenoff et al., 2001), was the most common significant predictor of T2 variables (see Figure 1), such that higher levels of concentrated disadvantage measured at T1 were significantly related to higher levels of household chaos, negative parenting strategies, poor child emotion regulation skills, and parent stress at T2. Parent reports of poor child emotion regulation at T1 predicted poor child emotion regulation, higher levels of household chaos, and higher levels of negative parenting strategies at T2. Results will be discussed in terms interventions and policies that focus on whole-family and community approaches to improve child and parent outcomes.

Authors

• Alexandra Nancarrow, Institute for Employment Studies
  Presenting Author

• Ansley Gilpin, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
  Non-Presenting Author