The Links Between Economic Vulnerability, Family Stress and Children's Social-Emotional Competence

Background and Purpose: 

Low-income families experience economic pressures, from chronic poverty-level income and rapid income loss, which adversely affect their members. Caregiver-child interactions may be vulnerable to these social-environmental factors, lending to effects on children’s social-emotional outcomes. Research from distinct family stress models suggest robust links between economic insecurity, caregiver distress, the degree to which caregiving is supportive, nurturing, and responsive, and children’s social-emotional competence. Yet, no study has included all of these factors in one model. Therefore, this current study builds a new family stress model to link family economic vulnerability to children’s social-emotional competence, using rich, multidimensional measures with nuanced relationships to model family processes. The purpose of this study is to create a more comprehensive model that may better reflect the realities of low-income families’ lives.  

Methods:

This study’s data is from the Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study; specifically the 1999 and 2001 waves of the general and embedded developmental (of families’ with preschoolers) studies. This sample is comprised of 366 families. The average child age was 5 years old (62.8 months). Almost half of the caregivers (47%) are Latina/Hispanic, while 43% are African-American. On average, each family has 1.8 adults and 1.6 children in the household. Finally, the average family income was right at the 2001 poverty line.

In total, 13 caregiver-report scales and 6 researcher-report scales were included in the analysis. Of these, 3 items measured economic vulnerability (including a non-linear measure of income-to-needs), 5 measured material hardship, 2 measured caregiver distress, 3 measured “sensitive” caregiving, 2 measured child responses to the caregiver, 3 measured children’s social-emotional competence, and 1 measured caregiver-child connectedness.

Stata 14 was used to test the structural equation model, using non-parametric bootstrapping to address data nonnormality. Full Information Maximum Likelihood allowed the inclusion of cases with missing values.

Results: The final model had an admirable fit (RMSEA=.027, CI .012 to .039; CFI=.952; TLI=.941). The results were both confirmatory and surprising. I found the anticipated linear and non-linear relationship between income relative to need and material hardship. However, there was no relationship between negative income change and material hardship experiences nor caregiver distress.  Caregiver distress seems most affected by material hardship experiences. Surprisingly, the anticipated relationship between caregiver distress and “sensitive” caregiving was missing until caregiving was further specified into “Reported Caregiving” and “Observed Caregiving”. These categories of caregiving also served useful when measuring caregiver-child connectedness and children’s social-emotional competence. In addition, while many of the hypothesized relationships between observed variables and their latent variable were found, the groupings were more nuanced than hypothesized.

Conclusions and Implications:

This study’s findings suggest that the relationship between economic vulnerability and children’s well-being may be more complex than initially anticipated. In addition to confirming and helping to further specify these interconnected processes (suggesting areas of further study), this study also has direct implications for social work practice and policy. For instance, this study’s indicators can also be used as points of intervention and thus further informing social work’s pursuit of evidence-based practice.