Welfare Receipt, Financial Strain, and African‐American Adolescent Functioning

Mothers' Transitions from Welfare to Work and the Well-Being of Preschoolers and Adolescents

“…A more consistent finding indicates that higher family incomes lead to improvements in child well-being (5,6). For adolescents, findings are also inconsistent, with some indication of negative impacts of welfare participation on adolescents' educational attainment (7), but other evidence of positive effects, especially for African-American adolescents (8,9). In contrast, when mothers work outside the home, children's development is consistently unaffected (10), with the possible exception of modest decrements in cognitive development in non-Hispanic white children if their mothers had been employed during their children's infancy (11).…”

“…For example, the self-esteem of mothers of adolescents often significantly increased when those mothers went to work and often significantly decreased when they left work, suggesting that a more positive self-concept may be important in linking maternal employment and teenager outcomes, perhaps through role modeling (16). Alternatively, adolescents are perceptive and sensitive to the pressures of poverty and economic hardship in their families (8,31), so their anxiety levels may decrease as they see their mothers going to work each day. Similarly, our findings suggest that teenagers may express their feelings of disappointment or worry about finances as depression or anger when their mothers leave employment.…”

Economic Stress, Emotional Quality of Life, and Problem Behavior in Chinese Adolescents with and without Economic Disadvantage

“…Lempers et al (1989) showed that economic stress had both direct and indirect effect on depression-loneliness distress and indirect effect on delinquency and drug use in poor adolescents. Other researchers found that economic disadvantage exerted negative influences on family processes, such as marital quality and parenting of the parents, which affected the development of emotional distress (Ge et al, 1992), internalization and externalization symptoms (Conger et al, 1994), socio-emotional problems, including anxiety, cognitive distress and self-esteem problem (McLoyd et al, 1994), and school performance problem (Coley and Chase-Lansdale, 2000) in poor adolescent children. Whitbeck et al (1997) further reported that deterioration of the parents' working conditions and family economic hardship impaired parents' parenting behavior which in turn negatively affected children's efficacy.…”

The impact of community risks and resources on adolescent risky behavior and health care expenditures

“…For each indicator, a statewide distribution was created. Each county was compared with the state distribution for that indicator and ranked by quartile (1)(2)(3)(4). Quartile rankings for each indicator were then summed by the following domains: social capital (number of schools, number of churches/temples/synagogues, number of adults with high school diplomas, number of two-parent households); access to physicians (number of pediatricians, obstetrician/ gynecologists, family physicians, adolescent medicine); availability of safety net settings (community health centers, public substance abuse and family planning clinics); community risky behavior rates (teen pregnancy prevalence, STD prevalence among teens, teen tobacco use prevalence, teen suicide prevalence); violence (crime rate, teen nonsuicide deaths); and percentages of the county population that were African American and Hispanic.…”

“…A large and growing body of research has begun to address the contextual risks and protective factors that lead to or ameliorate adolescents' engagement in risky behavior [1][2][3][4][5]. At the same time, growing attention is focused on promoting positive youth development and investing in communities where youth reside [6 -8].…”