Multidimensional Poverty, Household Composition, and Parenting Stress

Background & Purpose: Scholars have long recognized that living in poverty is multidimensional. Complex disadvantage includes low income, low assets, unstable housing, poor health (e.g. lack of access to health care), social exclusion (e.g. unemployment), and lack of access to opportunity (e.g. low educational attainment). Years of study have documented that various dimensions of poverty, as well as household composition, impact parenting stress. However, few studies have examined the multidimensionality of poverty, household composition, and parenting stress attending to racial differences. This study explores two main questions: (1) How do dimensions of poverty cluster among families with children in the Detroit metro area, and how do these differ by race? (2) How are poverty dimensions and household composition related to parenting stress, and are there any differences by race?

Methods: The Michigan Recession and Recovery Study (MRRS) is a 3-wave survey gathered from a stratified random representative sample of adults aged 19 to 64 living in the Detroit metropolitan Area during 2009. Respondents completed hour-long in-person interviews in 2009-2010 (N = 914), in 2011 (N = 847), and 2013 (N = 751). We conducted univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses of the MRRS to examine the prevalence and impact of dimensions of poverty on parenting stress by race. The dependent variable of interest is measured using the parenting stress index (PSI-SF). Independent variables of interest were the eight dimensions of poverty among households with children: (1) low income, (2) low parental educational attainment, (3) forgone medical care (4) living in a high poverty neighborhood, (5) unemployment 10 or more months of the past 12 months, (6) housing instability, (7) asset poverty, (8) food insecurity. Measures of household composition include marital status, age of children, and number of adults in the household.

Results: Racial disparities in the experience of multidimensional poverty were clear. For example, 78.8% of Black households with children experienced two or more dimensions of poverty simultaneously, compared to 30.1% of non-Black households. Experiencing two or more dimensions increased parenting stress for all households. When analyzing dimensions in a multivariate analyses, we found that ten to twelve months of unemployment was significantly related to parenting stress for Black households. In contrast, instead of poverty measures predicting parenting stress for nonblack households, measures such as parental depression, child age, and marital status were related to parenting stress. In all households, the number of children significantly predicted level of parenting stress.

Conclusions & Implications: Our research suggests that a far higher prevalence of Black households with children struggle with multiple poverty dimensions compared to nonblack households. In addition, poverty dimensions and household composition do not impact Black and nonblack households’ parenting stress equally or in similar ways. Parenting stress has been shown to have a complex but significant relationship to child outcomes. Thus, any interventions geared to decreasing parenting stress and improving child outcomes must take a comprehensive approach that targets multiple domains of poverty.