Young Black Children's Behavior Problems: The Influences of Single-Mother Parenting and Nonresident-Father Involvement

Young Black Children’s Behavior Problems: The Influences of Single-Mother Parenting and Nonresident-Father involvement

 

Abstract

 

Background/Purpose:  More than half of all black children are being raised in a family headed by a single mother.  These families have extraordinarily high rates of poverty.  Poverty diminishes the quality of parenting due to persistent daily stressors, especially among mothers with limited access to social and financial support.  These circumstances are associated with a number of negative outcomes for young black children, including more behavior problems as they begin their school careers.  Some have raised issues about the role of nonresident biological fathers in these outcomes.

In this study, we examine longitudinally the influences of nonresident fathers’ involvement with 3-year-old black children on single mothers’ parenting adequacy and children’s socioemotional development as they prepare to enter elementary school at age 5.  There is evidence that nonresident fathers’ involvement with their children is associated with beneficial outcomes for preschoolers in low-income black families.  These findings must be considered preliminary, however, because they come from a small number of studies and small samples.  We address this limitation in the literature by using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a large national dataset.

Methods:  Data and sample:  Fragile Families is a 9-wave study that examines the characteristics of unmarried parents, the relationships between them, and the consequences for children.  Among 4,898 households, 492 single black mothers who were current or former welfare recipients and their focal children were selected for this study.  Survey interviews with mothers at times 3 and 5, when the children were 3 years old and 5 years old, respectively, were utilized.

Measures:  We used measures of fathers’ presence, maternal depressive symptoms, maternal parenting stress, maternal parenting, and child behavior problems at time 3, and a measure of the children’s behavior problems at time 5.  

Results:  Using structural equation modeling, we found that the availability of social and instrumental support from fathers was associated negatively with mothers’ depressive symptoms and parenting stress, and positively with mothers’ parenting quality.  Parenting stress and parenting quality, in turn, exhibited the expected relationships to child behavior problems at time 3; positive for parenting stress and negative for parenting quality.   Behavior problems at time 5 were indirectly influenced by less father involvement, as well as mothers’ greater parenting stress and less adequate parenting.  The model produced a Yuan-Bentler scaled chi-square of 26.13 with 18 degrees of freedom (p = .09), a comparative fit index of .958, and a root mean square error of approximation of .030, all indicating a good fit to the data.

Conclusion:  It is worthy of note that the current findings did not reject the empirical authenticity of the mediating processes tested.  Given that a strength of the present study is the use of a large national dataset to test relationships reported in past research with smaller regional samples, these processes may provide clues for interventions in programs aimed at reducing the adverse consequences of single parenting for young children in poor black families.