Session: The Inter-Relationships between Neighborhood and Parenting Risks on Child Wellbeing (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

A growing literature grounded in the ecological framework demonstrates the inter-relationships between neighborhood conditions and parenting practices and how they affect child well-being. However, the precise nature of these inter-relationships remains under-studied. For example, do neighborhood characteristics and parenting practices represent separate risk pathways for child development? Or does parenting mediate the relationship between neighborhood conditions and child behavior problems? Are other background variables the true cause of these observed relationships? Social disorganization theory provides the theoretical ground for the link between neighborhood and parenting risks and its effects on child development. Neighborhood risk factors such as lack of positive social processes (i.e., mutual support among residents and informal social control), high levels of crime and violence, poverty and structural disadvantage, and lack of institutional resources have all been shown to increase adverse child outcomes.

The studies in this symposium advance our knowledge of the processes by which neighborhood conditions affect risk for child maltreatment and child behavior problems in several ways. First is the use of unique sources of data to examine the links between neighborhood conditions and parenting, including police crime data from Chicago, point-located social service data, administrative child welfare data for the most populous county in the nation, a representative sample of urban U.S. families, and both neighborhood-level and individual data from an international sample of Latin American families. Second, several of the studies use statistical models that are considerably more advanced than prior research, affording the ability to study growth trajectories of child well-being over time, to control for a much larger set of possibly confounding variables, and the ability to account for the spatial distribution of study participants.

The first paper employs longitudinal multilevel models on City of Chicago Police Department data to estimate the contagion of parenting norms across proximal neighborhoods, particularly, child physical abuse. The second paper employs fixed effects regression models to examine the simultaneous relationships between neighborhood disorganization, parental spanking, and child behavior problems using data from Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a representative sample of U.S. families in urban areas. The third paper uses data from the Santiago Longitudinal Study to estimate the relationship between parenting dimensions, neighborhood characteristics, and problem behavior among Chilean adolescents. The final paper uses GIS mapping and spatial analytic techniques to measure the relationship between geographic access to immigration and parenting services and neighborhood rates of child maltreatment in Los Angeles County.

Each study will present clear implications specific to neighborhood effects on parenting. While most prevention and intervention efforts primarily or exclusively address family and parent risk factors, the studies herein suggest that intervention focusing on social norms, mutual support, local service availability, and other structural conditions within neighborhoods are also valid targets for intervention. We conclude with a discussion of the need of multilevel interventions that address both community and parenting risks.