The Health Literacy of Parents in the United States: A Nationally Representative Study

Abstract

A large proportion of US parents have limited health-literacy skills. Decreasing literacy demands on parents, including simplification of health insurance and other medical forms, as well as medication and food labels, is needed to decrease health care access barriers for children and allow for informed parent decision-making. Addressing low parent health literacy may ameliorate existing child health disparities.

Parental Health Literacy, Knowledge and Beliefs Regarding Upper Respiratory Infections (URI) in an Urban Latino Immigrant Population

“…We also confirmed a lack of consistency across study variables between two commonly used measures of health literacy in our sample population, the S-TOFHLA and NVS. It is estimated that one in four or 21 million parents living in the US have limited health literacy skills 21 , and poorer literacy and numeracy skills in parents or caregivers may create difficulties in the application of health-related information to the care of their children. 22,23 Latino parents with limited English proficiency are more likely to have inadequate health literacy.…”

Parent Health Literacy and Communication With Diabetes Educators in a Pediatric Diabetes Clinic: A Mixed Methods Approach

“…In a secondary analysis of data from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, Yin et al (2009) estimated that 1 in 4 parents in the U.S. have low health literacy, a slightly lower prevalence than that found in the general adult population. In comparison, Hassan & Heptulla (2010) reported that 1 in 6 parents of children with type 1 diabetes had limited health literacy.…”

“…For example, college educated parents are more likely to be assertive with their opinions and ask questions of the provider than their less educated counterparts (Street, 1992). These same characteristics, namely minority race, less than high school education, and low socioeconomic status have been associated with limited health literacy (Yin et al, 2009). …”

“…Low parental literacy skills has been associated with less than 12th grade education; parents with less than high school education were 8 times more likely to have low health literacy skills than parents with higher education experience (Bennett, Robbins, & Haecker, 2003 (Kutner, Greenberg, Jin, & and Paulsen, 2006, p. 14). Low parental health literacy has been associated with lack of health insurance for the child (Yin et al, 2009) and living in a single parent household (Bennett et al, 2003), both proxies for lower socioeconomic status.…”

“…Purposeful selection began with an analysis of each variable as a single predictor of the outcome including health literacy (variable of interest) and other variables that have been associated with quality of communication including parent education level, income, race, and child's duration of diabetes, and hemoglobin A1C level (Howe, et al, 2012;Stevens, et al, 2005;Yin, et al, 2009). Predictors with p-values < .25, a significance level recommended by Hosmer and Lemeshow (2013) to identify important variables, were retained for multiple logistic regression analysis.…”