The Relationship of Temperament, Parenting Stress, Maternal Child Interaction and Child Health

Background: Considering the relationship between maternal and child factors that impact child health is important in understanding child wellbeing. Increasing evidence suggests that early life adverse events and low SES impact health. Health status impacts children’s future wellbeing in the areas of education, opportunity, and longevity. Despite its importance, social workers with specialized training in integrated behavioral health report needing more information on both physical and mental health. Research in health has illuminated many factors (e.g. chaos, maternal factors, social support, parenting practices, mother’s health rating of child, and child characteristics) that both positively and negatively impact physical and mental health. One study found a relationship between temperament, maternal sensitivity and obesity.

The study sought to expand existing knowledge by considering the relationship between temperament, maternal parenting stress, maternal child interaction, poverty ratio, and overall health status of children. The study addressed the following hypotheses: 1) children with more difficult temperament will have decreased health status; 2) parents who report more parenting stress will have children with lower health rating; and 3) increased maternal child interaction will result in higher health ratings.

Methods: Cross-sectional multinomial logistic regression was conducted using the year one public Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing data set to determine the relationship between the study variables. The sample consists of data on 4700 births and is nationally representative of non-marital births.   

Measures: Temperament was measured using a mean score of three emotionality questions from the EAS questionnaire, parenting stress was measured by questions from the JOBS survey that considered parenting aggravation from which a mean aggravation score was created, and maternal child interaction was determined via maternal report of the number of days a week engaging in various activities and again were used to create a mean maternal child interaction score. Last, poverty ratio was a constructed variable in the data set based on total household income, family size and number of people in the house.

Results: Temperament, maternal parenting stress, maternal child interaction, and poverty ratio were significant predictors of health status. Temperament, maternal parenting, and poverty ratio were significant across all health ratings of very good, good, and fair/poor when compared to the reference group of excellent health. For maternal child interaction, there was a significant relationship between good and very good health rating when compared to excellent but not for fair/poor. In terms of direction, as emotionality and parenting aggravation increased health rating decreases, as maternal child interaction decreases child health rating decreased for very good and good as compared to excellent and as the poverty ratio decreased, health rating decreased.

Conclusions and Implications: Emotionality, parenting aggravation, maternal child interaction and poverty were found to have a significant relationship with child health status. This finding can benefit social workers in integrated behavior health care and early childhood settings and underscores the importance of better screening of individual child characteristics, parenting stress, maternal child interaction particularly for families experiencing poverty. Further research will consider the interaction of the variables to further understand these relationships.