The Relations Between Persistent Poverty and Contextual Risk and Children's Behavior in Elementary School.

Abstract

Does persistent adversity over time have effects on children's behavior beyond the effects of intermittent or concurrent adversity? This study examined the relations between school behavior in 5th grade (mean age = 11 years 0 months) and indexes representing persistent poverty and contextual risk. The indexes described 2-year intervals of family adversity. The results showed effects for persistent risk over 2 consecutive intervals for several factors, but only for recent intervals (3rd and 5th grades), and the factors differed for externalizing behavior, internalizing behavior, and academic competence. The 3rd interval of risk added little to the outcomes, and most factors did not show persistence effects. The results highlight the need for caution in expecting and interpreting effects for persistent adversity.

The Mediating Role of Parental Psychological Health in Chinese Families in an Impoverished Context in Hong Kong

“…Moreover, the findings from the current study indicate that it is not poverty itself contributing predominantly to poor family development and relationships, but rather multiple contextual stressors at family level in a cumulative nature, amalgamatively accounting for the variance, which is consistent with prior research (Ackerman et al, 2004;Dilworth-Bart et al, 2007). In fact, results of this study tally with the family stress model (Conger et al, 1995;Mistry et al, 2002) and the demoralization thesis (Brody et al, 1999) that an impoverished contextual environment may have an indirectly negative impact on the proper functioning of a family and development of its children, through harming parents' mental health.…”

“…In fact, results of this study tally with the family stress model (Conger et al, 1995;Mistry et al, 2002) and the demoralization thesis (Brody et al, 1999) that an impoverished contextual environment may have an indirectly negative impact on the proper functioning of a family and development of its children, through harming parents' mental health. The present study and limited number of previous research have explored this potential mediational mechanism (Ackerman et al, 2004;Brody et al, 1999), and, to our knowledge, this study is the first one of its kind to investigate the mediational role of parental psychological health in an impoverished Chinese context, which is characteristic of high parenting stress and demandingness in parental role reported in literature (Kwok & Wong, 2000).…”

“…Recent literature proposed that impoverishment concomitant with adverse contextual conditions in the family realm may compromise parents' psychological health, convincing them that they are incapable of performing various tasks that they need to fulfill for their parental role (Ackerman et al, 2004;Sanders & Woolley, 2005). This process of demoralization is anticipated to occasion psychological distress and difficulties in parents, such as heightened parenting stress and reduced sense of self-efficacy (Brody et al, 1999;Raikes & Thompson, 2005), which in turn is thought to bring about detrimental effects on family functioning.…”

“…Thirteen family stressors were selected as relevant by referring to prior studies (Ackerman et al, 2004;Raikes & Thompson, 2005). These stressors included unemployment, economic difficulties, divorce, marital problems, maladjustment to the residential environment, employment difficulties, health problems of family members, health problems of a parent, death of a family member, academic problems of children, welfare dependency, single parenthood, and having a new immigrant family member.…”

“…On the other hand, literature and research has demonstrated that poverty itself does not explain all the variance in family functioning; rather, it is probably the multiple stressors in a cumulative nature at the family level incurred from concurrent financial strain that produce undesirable family functioning characteristics (Ackerman et al, 2004;Linver et al, 2002) including poor parenting styles, estranged interpersonal relationships, and inadequate communications within the family (Barnett, 2008;Raikes & Thompson, 2005). This is consistent with the ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998), in which families in an impoverished neighborhood need simultaneously to deal with multiple family-level stressors that are coexisting amalgamatively (Barnett, 2008;Linver et al, 2002).…”