Parental Involvement As a Promotive Factor of Competence in African American Children in Informal Kinship Care

Background and Purpose: In the United States, grandparents or other kin are the primary caregivers of approximately 2.7 million children.  While the rates of kinship care continue to increase; especially among African Americans, little is known about how the role of parental involvement affects children’s competence (e.g., social & school).  Currently, we know of only one study that has found an association between parent-child relationships and competence, but it does not take into account parents’ involvement with relative caregivers.  Given the negative consequences such as mental health problems and delinquency due to deficits in competence; it is imperative to examine pathways to the development of competence among children in kinship care.  First, we examine whether biological mother (MOM) and father’s (DAD) involvement occurs along 4 dimensions: parent-child relationship; parent-caregiver relationship; frequency of parent-child contact; frequency of parent-caregiver contact.   Second, we use a risk and resilience framework to examine whether parental involvement is a promotive factor of competence (e.g., social & school) in African American children in informal kinship care.

 

Methods: This study analyzed existing longitudinal data from a U.S. Children’s Bureau funded study about informal kinship care families.  All African American children who at baseline had an observation of the Child Behavior Checklist Competence Scale were selected to participate in the current study.  Thus, the study’s sample consists of 124 African American children who at Wave 1 were between the ages of 5.9 years to 11.2 years.  The Beavers Self Report Family Functioning is an additional standardized measures included in this study.  Structural Equation Modeling was used to analyze data. 

 

Results: As hypothesized, biological mother and father involvement occurs along 4 dimensions; fit indices obtained from confirmatory factor analysis indicated acceptable to good construct validity of both DAD (CFI = 0.975, TLI = 0.926, SRMR = 0.026, WRMR = 0.624) and MOM (CFI = 0.975, TLI = 0.926, SRMR = 0.055, WRMR = 0.745).  Structural Equation Modeling determined that when controlling for family functioning, the quality of the relationship between biological mother and child, and other demographic variables, paternal involvement has a statistically significant positive path to competence (b* = 0.265, p < 0.001). This final model accounted for 27% of explained variance in total competence, and  model fit ranged from acceptable to good (Χ2/df = 1.75; RMSEA = 0.078, CI90 = 0.049 – 0.106; CFI = 0.968; TLI = 0.958; SRMR = 0.058).  In this study’s sample, mother’s involvement only revealed a positive trend with competence; thus, it was dropped from the final model (p=.055)

 

Implications:  Given this study’s findings that suggest the importance of paternal involvement and the quality of the mother-child relationship on children’s competence, it is clear that practitioners should work with informal kinship care families to help facilitate positive interactions among biological parents, caregivers, and children to foster children’s competence.  Future research should consider different measures to assess mother and father’s parental involvement.