Parenting Stress Among Informal Kinship Caregivers: Exploring the Role of African American Fathers
Over 2 million children in the United States are currently living in a relative’s home without either of their biological parents present. Most of these children are not under the supervision of child welfare agencies and are living in familial arrangements classified as informal kinship care. Children enter informal kinship care for various reasons, including abuse and/or neglect, parental incarceration, parental substance abuse, or parental illness. It might be assumed that biological parents have no contact with their children and their caregivers; however, research suggests that parents maintain contact to various degrees. While researchers have explored the impact of biological parent involvement on child and adolescent outcomes, there has been no exploration of the impact of biological parent involvement on caregiver’s level of parenting stress. Lower levels of father involvement have been shown to negatively impact parenting stress among single mothers in fragile families. This research seeks to understand the relationship between father involvement and caregiver parenting stress among an equally vulnerable familial type. This line of research is important given that caregiver’s parenting stress has a positive association with child behavioral and emotional outcomes in informal kinship care.
Method
This secondary analysis examined data collected from 185 African American informal kinship caregivers at four points in time (651 observations). Caregiver stress was measured using the Parenting Stress Index Short Form (PSI-SF). Father Involvement was measured using single item measures of frequency of contact with the caregiver and father-caregiver relationship quality. Higher scores on each of these measures indicated higher levels of stress, more frequent contact and higher quality relationships. Data were analyzed in SPSS 21 using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE). GEE models are used to account for the within subject correlation of repeated measures predictor variables when exploring causal relationships. A population averaged GEE approach was used in this analysis to model the average response for observations across all subjects.
Results
The majority of caregivers were female (96%), including grandmothers, aunts, sisters and cousins, and 23% were related to the child’s father. Approximately half of caregivers reported some contact with the child’s biological father. When accounting for factors known to significantly impact parenting stress in this sample (number of children in home, marital status, child’s externalizing behaviors, caregiver’s perception of family functioning and family resources), father’s involvement was a significant predictor of caregivers’ level of parenting stress. Caregiver’s level of parenting stress was positively associated with frequency of father-caregiver contact (β= 2.36, SE = 0.99,Wald Chi-Square = 5.62, p = .018) but inversely related to quality of the father-caregiver relationship (β= -2.54, SE = 0.92, Wald Chi-Square = 7.61, p = .006).
Implications
Results of this analysis suggest that biological fathers have a significant impact on informal kinship caregivers’ parenting stress. Coupled with recent census data, which suggests that children are living informally with kin for extended periods of time, these results have implications for the development of programs that will promote healthy contact between African American fathers and the relatives caring for their children.