The Impact Of Negative Social Contexts On Low-Income Single Mother's Aggressive Parenting Styles

Purpose

Parenting styles have been widely recognized as having crucial impact on child development, such as child educational achievement and social emotional issues. Parenting intervention plays an important role in correcting and improving parenting manners. However, previous research regarding parenting intervention often viewed parenting practice as an issue within families, without paying necessary attention to the impact of outside contexts (Kotchick & Forehand, 2002; McDonell, 2007). This study specifically examines the impact of low-income single mother's exposure to out-of-family violence on their aggressive and assaulting parenting styles.

Methods

The sample consists of 246 single mothers aged between 16-50 with income below 200 percent of the poverty line, and without the presence of partners and grandparents at home. I use joined data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Studies (FFCW) wave three mother core data, and the In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children data connected to FFCW. FFCW has conducted surveys in 20 cities nationwide and focused on fragile families with high rate of unwed births. The data used here were collected about three years after mothers giving births to children. Most surveys were in 2001-2003.

Ordinal Logistic Regressions are used for the analysis, which allows dependent variables to have three and more ordinal values when meeting parallel model assumption. The dependent variables are two indexes representing the intensity of aggressive parenting and assaulting parenting respectively, with both indexes being categorized into low, medium, and high levels. The construction of both parenting indexes is based on the instruction from FFCW. Aggressive parenting includes manners such as shouting, cursing, and threatening toward kids; assaulting parenting includes manners such as spanking, slapping, and pinching. The independent variables are three dummy coded variables indicating low, medium, and high levels of exposure to violence, which are based on an index formulated from 7 questions regarding the frequencies of respondents seeing or being involved in out-of-family violence such as beating, attacking with weapons, shooting, and killing. Control factors include parental stress, social supports, housing condition, substance use, economic status, mother's health status, demographic features, and etc.

Results

Findings from the Ordinal Logistic Regressions indicate that: (a) compared with mothers without exposure to violence, mothers with medium level of violence exposure were 2.2 times (p<.05) more likely to use higher level of assaulting parenting manners; mothers with high levels of violence exposure were 3.5 times (p<.001) more likely to use higher levels of assaulting parenting manners, and 2.8 times (p<.01) more likely to use higher levels of aggressive parenting manners; (b) higher parental stress and being black (vs. white) increase the odds of employing more intense aggressive and assaulting parenting styles, and higher alcohol use increases the odds of more aggressive parenting styles.

Implications

Violent social contexts significantly affect low-income single mother's parenting styles. This suggests that parenting interventions targeting at low-income single mothers should be aware of this impact, and service agents aiming at assisting parenting promotion should consider necessary treatment to relieve single mothers from such negative impact.