Maternal Involvement, Poverty, and Black Mothers’ Well-Being: How Being Involved with Children Affects Black Mothers’ Well-Being

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Black Families

Abstract

Maternal involvement is the consistent engagement of mothers in their children’s lives. Involvement can range from reading or talking to children to helping adolescents complete homework. Intensive parenting ideologies stress the importance of parental involvement which due to the gendered nature of parenting, mostly falls to mothers. Research on intensive parenting notes that there is a rewards-demands aspect and that endorsement of intensive parenting ideology takes a toll on mothers as they make sacrifices and face parenting role strain that worsens their well-being. However, for Black parents, strong kinship bonds are cited as a core strength of Black families thus, maternal involvement may be seen as a positive parent-child interaction that Black mothers may feel rewarded by more than they feel the demands. However, due to the higher likelihood of Black families to face poverty and economic insecurity, the potential positive association of maternal involvement on Black mothers’ well-being may be damped or exacerbated if the potential association is detrimental to Black mothers’ well-being. However, there is heterogeneity among Black mothers at the low-end of the socioeconomic spectrum, as mothers may beat or far below the poverty threshold. Using a sample of Black mothers from the Future of Families and Child Well-Being Study (N = 1,584), mixed effects linear regressions examine whether maternal involvement is associated with Black mothers’ health and parenting stress, and whether poverty moderates that association over time. Results show that maternal involvement independently improves Black mothers’ health and reduces parenting stress. Poverty is shown to reduce the magnitude of the association on health during early to late childhood, but not adolescence. However, the association between maternal involvement and parenting stress does not differ by poverty over time. The findings suggest that maternal involvement serves as a protective factor even during times of economic hardship.

Author

• Deonté M. Hughes, University of Maryland-College Park