An Investigation of the Sources 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. This study aims to identify the latent classes of maternal social support and to examine the trajectory 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, 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 scale was used in previous studies, and it proved a strong reliability in our study sample. The independent variables involving maternal social support were measured at year-5 and concerned seven categories: (1) financial support, (2) financial support in emergency, (3) housing support, (4) childcare support, (5) trust from others (co-sign at bank), (6) emotional support, and (7) advice from parents. 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 support oriented (8.3%), high-level: advice oriented (1.5%), high-level: emotional support 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), lower income (X2=423.627, P<.001), and 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.

Implications: Overall, our study provides empirical evidence to show that single mothers are more likely to have less social support given the following conditions: (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 emotional support may be a key factor in the relationship between social supports and 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.