A Study of Maternal Social Supports and Conditions Effecting Children's Behaviors

Background: Single mothers and their children comprise a population that continues to increase rapidly. Significantly, this at risk population of mothers is more likely than others to be vulnerable, and their children are more likely than others to express delinquent behavior. Relatively few studies, however, investigate the effects of patterns of maternal social support on a child’s delinquent behavior. Understanding the roles of maternal social support will increase understanding strategies that can provide information about a child’s delinquent behavior within families. Ultimately, the purpose of this study is to identify the latent classes of maternal social support and to examine the effects of each individual latent category, which is classified as social support, for single mothers as regards their child’s delinquent behavior.

Method: Using year-5 data from Fragile Families and Child Well-being (FFCW), the analytical sample for this study consisted of 3357 single mothers in the United States. The dependent variables included a child’s delinquent behavior, which were measured at year-5 by the aggressive subscale. The independent variables, involving maternal social support, were measured at year-5 and concerned seven categories. Social-demographic characteristics are included for each pattern. Latent Class Analysis (LCA), crosstab analysis, multiple logistic regression analysis, and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), were mainly used for data analysis, using SPSS 21.0 and Mplus 6.12.

Results: The patterns of maternal social support were categorized into five classes (AIC: 72083.912, BIC: 72359.258, Entropy: .808, p<.001); low-level support (1.4%); low-level: emotional oriented (8.3%), high-level: advice oriented (1.5%), high-level; emotional oriented (31.8%), high-level: trust oriented (56.9%). According to the sociodemographic distribution of each pattern, low-support patterns show trends of younger (X²=70.894 P<.001), lower education (X²=189.081 P<.001), income (X²=423.627, P<.001), physical health(X²=184.464, P<.001), mother living with her child independent of child’s grandparents (X²=65.569 P<.001), and negative relationship with biological father (X²=120.975 P<.001). The mean comparison of the child’s delinquent behavior by maternal social support patterns shows significant difference among patterns (F=5.465, p<.001). In post-hoc, two emotional support orientation patterns show significantly lower child’s delinquent behavior.

Conclusions/implications: Overall, our study provides empirical evidence to show that single mothers are more likely to have less social support given the following conditions. These include the following: (1) that the mother is younger, (2) holds a lower educational degree, (3) has a lower household income, (4) lives independently from mothers’ parents, (5) has a negative relationship with children’s father, and (6) are generally unhealthy. Indeed, stronger emotional support for single mothers was found to lead to a lower level of child’s delinquent behavior because emotional support influenced childcare and education situations. Thus, although some mothers were among a high risk and vulnerable population, our findings indicate that maternal emotional support may be a key factor to approach to lower the children’s delinquent behavior. Given our findings, policy and program interventions, accordingly, might focus on improving emotional support for single mothers in order to improve children’s behavior.