low-SES Parents Research Articles

Latent profile analysis of family and school supports among Chinese adolescents in stepfamilies.

Divorce and remarriage rates have increased dramatically in China, and more children live in stepfamilies. There remain valuable opportunities to understand the various family and school assets that support the well-being of Chinese youth amid family structural transitions, such as the transition to stepfamily life. Using latent profile analysis, the current study seeks to identify patterns of youth support using seven family-related variables and two school-related variables as indicators among a sample of Chinese youth (N = 269; = 14 years; 129 females and 117 males) residing with a parent and stepparent. Four profiles were identified: low support, academic focus/low support, moderate support, and high support. Results further demonstrated that youth in the moderate support profile had significantly better well-being outcomes compared to youth in the low support or academic focus/low support profiles; demographic characteristics such as low SES families and parents with lower education backgrounds were associated with the low support profile; and stepfamilies with stepfathers were overrepresented in the moderate support profile, whereas stepfamilies with stepmothers were overrepresented in the low support and academic focus/low support profiles. These findings can inform the development of interventions intended to bolster the well-being of Chinese adolescents in stepfamilies.

Adaptive educational expectations: How do parental educational expectations respond to child academic performance in various family contexts?

Parental educational expectations are well-studied in sociology of education and social stratification and mobility, but most literature conceptualizes these expectations as static or considers how they change only at key educational junctures such as educational transitions. Whether parental educational expectations adapt to child academic performance more generally, and what might be the key theoretical components in adaptation, are not well-conceptualized or tested. To address these limitations, we posit and test the concept of adaptive educational expectations. Our concept encompasses three key propositions: adaptability – parental expectations adapt to child academic performance; relative responsiveness – the adaptive response of parental expectations to child performance is larger in magnitude than the responsiveness of child performance to parental expectations; and heterogeneity – the adaptability of parental expectations varies across family contexts. We test the concept using the case of China, the largest education system in the world, with analyses of longitudinal data from the China Education Panel Survey. Findings show that parental expectations are more adaptive to child performance in low-SES families than in high-SES families and in rural areas than in nonrural areas, but there is no difference in adaptability by child gender and sibship size. These findings indicate that the adaptation of educational expectations is more shaped by socioeconomic circumstances than family demographics. Furthermore, the use of this concept reveals a hidden form of educational inequality that prior literature often neglects: compared with high-SES parents, low-SES parents not only hold lower educational expectations but are more likely to decrease their expectations when child academic performance declines, which further reduces their educational involvement. These findings illustrate the relevance of all three features of the adaptive educational expectations concept.

Economic mobility and parents’ opportunity hoarding

Creating opportunities for people to achieve socioeconomic mobility is a widely shared societal goal. Paradoxically, however, achieving this goal can pose a threat to high-socioeconomic-status (SES) people as they look to maintain their privileged positions in society for both them and their children. Two studies evaluate whether this threat manifests as "opportunity hoarding" in which high-SES parents adopt attitudes and behaviors aimed at shoring up their families' access to valuable educational and economic resources. The current paper provides converging evidence for this hypothesis across two studies conducted with 2,557 American parents. An initial correlational study demonstrated that believing that socioeconomic mobility is possible was associated with high-SES parents being more inclined to attempt to secure valuable educational and economic resources for their children, even when doing so came at the cost of low-SES families. Specifically, high-SES parents with stronger beliefs in socioeconomic mobility exhibited decreased support for redistributive policies and viewed engaging in discrete behaviors that would unfairly advantage their children (e.g., allowing them to misrepresent their identities on school and job applications) as more acceptable relative to both low-SES parents with similar beliefs and high-SES parents who were less optimistic about socioeconomic mobility. A subsequent experimental study established these relationships causally by comparing parents' responses to different types of socioeconomic mobility. Together, the current findings merge insights across psychology and economics to deepen understandings of the processes through which societal inequities emerge and persist, especially during times of apparently abundant opportunity.

The Necessity of Taking Culture and Context into Account When Studying the Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Brain Development.

Decades of research has revealed a relationship between childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and brain development at the structural and functional levels. Of particular note is the distinction between income and maternal education, two highly correlated factors which seem to influence brain development through distinct pathways. Specifically, while a families' income-to-needs ratio is linked with physiological stress and household chaos, caregiver education influences the day-to-day language environment a child is exposed to. Variability in either one of these environmental experiences is related to subsequent brain development. While this work has the potential to inform public policies in a way that benefits children, it can also oversimplify complex factors, unjustly blame low-SES parents, and perpetuate a harmful deficit perspective. To counteract these shortcomings, researchers must consider sociodemographic differences in the broader cultural context that underlie SES-based differences in brain development. This review aims to address these issues by (a) identifying how sociodemographic mechanisms associated with SES influence the day-to-day experiences of children, in turn, impacting brain development, while (b) considering the broader cultural contexts that may differentially impact this relationship.

Compensation or accentuation? How parents from different social backgrounds decide to support their children

Abstract Previous research has shown that parents respond to differences in their children’s potential by providing them with different levels of support, and that such support allocation decisions are shaped by socioeconomic status (SES). We extend this observation to the assumption, raised in research on parental compensation and social mobility, that not only the allocation, but also the form of support provided is socially stratified. Specifically, we investigate whether socioeconomically advantaged parents use mechanisms that do not rely directly on cognitive enhancement. Drawing on data from three consecutive waves of the German TwinLife study (N = 960), we use twin fixed-effects models to examine how parents respond to their children having different grades. We investigate parental support strategies, including help with schoolwork and school-related communication, encouragement and explicitly formulated expectations, and extracurricular cognitive stimulation. Our findings suggest that high-SES parents tend to compensate for their children’s poor performance by helping them with schoolwork, fostering communication, and formulating academic expectations and encouragement. However, no significant differences in support allocation between high- and low-SES parents were found. Moreover, we found no evidence that parents in either high- or low-SES families respond to differences in their children’s school performance by providing them with extracurricular cognitive stimulation.

Socioeconomic Status and Children’s Math Proficiency Development: The Role of Parental Math Expectation, Investment, and Involvement

Parental investment mechanisms underlying the relations between socioeconomic status (SES)and primary math proficiency are not well-understood. Using the lens of parental expectation, parental investment and parental stress model, present study narratively reviewed relevant literature on parental math expectation, math investment and math involvement that mediates the relations between SES and primary math proficiency. Evidence suggests that compared to high-SES parents, low-SES parents have low math expectation, poor math investment and math involvement by which low-SES influences poor math proficiency development over the primary schooling. Further research is necessary to confirm the parental investment pathways by which low-SES compared to high-SES influences children’s poor math proficiency during primary grades.

Contributing Factors of Willingness in Families Counseling among Low SES Parents' in Malaysia

Contributing Factors of Willingness in Families Counseling among Low SES Parents' in Malaysia

Parental stress and risk of child abuse: The role of socioeconomic status

Specialized literature points consistently to the relevance of parental stress in parenting practices and in the risk of child abuse. At the same time, it is known that socioeconomic status constitutes a risk factor to parental stress. This research aimed to compare differences in parental stress and risk of child abuse between different socioeconomic families, as well as determine whether parental stress constitutes a predictor of child abuse risk in both groups. The sample comprised 109 parents – 62 residents of low socioeconomic status in the Porto district and 47 residents of middle/high socioeconomic status in Funchal district – which completed the AAPI-2 and PSI. The results revealed that low-SES parents have higher levels of parental stress and are more likely to commit child abuse. It was also found that parental stress predicts the risk of child abuse both for low and middle/high SES parents, even if this relationship is stronger for low-income families. Thus, reducing parental stress may constitute an effective way to prevent child abuse by parents.

What can parents do? The causal mediating role of parenting in explaining SES differences in children's language development

Objective: This study estimates how much of the differences by socioeconomic status (SES) in children’s language development are mediated by parenting styles, parenting practices, and parental investments. Background: There are large differences in children’s language development by parental socioeconomic status (SES). According to some studies, SES gaps in language skills among preschoolers could be reduced substantially by intervening in the parenting styles, practices, and parental investments of low-SES parents. However, the extent to which parenting mediates the effects on language skills of growing up in low-SES contexts is still unknown. Method: This paper uses data from the National Educational Panel Study starting cohort 1, a random sample of children born between 2012 and 2013 in Germany and employs interventional causal mediation analysis to estimate the mediated share of the total effect of SES on children’s language that goes through parenting, broadly understood. Results: Parenting explains around one-third of the total effect of SES on early language skills, but close to nothing of the effect on later language skills. Conclusion: Although a share of the SES effect operates through parenting, and all parenting dimensions affect children’s language skills, interventions in parenting would be limited in their ability to reduce the gap in substantial ways. Alternative pathways, through which inequality in language skills is reproduced, could potentially explain a larger share of this effect.

A Qualitative Methods Approach to Reimagine Education-Related Parental Involvement among Low–Socioeconomic Status Families

Abstract Disparities in academic achievement have been well documented between low– and high–socioeconomic status (SES) students in the United States. Studies point to education-related parental involvement as a key factor in academic accomplishments, with higher parental involvement facilitating higher academic achievement. However, current definitions of parental involvement neglect interpretations of parental involvement held by low-SES parents. This work explored these definitions held by low-SES families through focus groups (n = 10) and individual interviews (n = 23) with parents of school-age children. Findings suggest that low-SES parents define parental involvement to include the vital role of siblings, limited communication with teachers unless behavioral or academic problems arise, and activating informal enrichment activities. Factors that hindered their involvement include having limited time for engaging in education-related activities and poor proficiency in educational materials. These findings suggest that the concept of parental involvement ought to be conceptualized in more nuanced ways to support the closure of the academic achievement gap between students from low- and high-SES families.

Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility

Social capital—the strength of an individual’s social network and community—has been identified as a potential determinant of outcomes ranging from education to health1–8. However, efforts to understand what types of social capital matter for these outcomes have been hindered by a lack of social network data. Here, in the first of a pair of papers9, we use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital. We measure and analyse three types of social capital by ZIP (postal) code in the United States: (1) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low versus high socioeconomic status (SES); (2) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship networks; and (3) civic engagement, such as rates of volunteering. These measures vary substantially across areas, but are not highly correlated with each other. We demonstrate the importance of distinguishing these forms of social capital by analysing their associations with economic mobility across areas. The share of high-SES friends among individuals with low SES—which we term economic connectedness—is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date10,11. Other social capital measures are not strongly associated with economic mobility. If children with low-SES parents were to grow up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-SES parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20% on average. Differences in economic connectedness can explain well-known relationships between upward income mobility and racial segregation, poverty rates, and inequality12–14. To support further research and policy interventions, we publicly release privacy-protected statistics on social capital by ZIP code at https://www.socialcapital.org.

Caseload, time-pressure and discrimination

Street-level bureaucrats are assumed to use discriminatory practices against clients to handle high workloads and psychological exhaustion. However, empirical research on the relationships between caseloads, time pressure and discrimination is limited. This article is one of the first to study this topic using a large correspondence experiment that captures actual real-life discriminatory behaviour. Swedish school principals were randomly contacted via email by parents with Arabic- or Swedish-sounding names and with low-SES and high-SES professions who were interested in placing their children at the school. The principals’ actual caseloads and perceived time pressure were captured using both registry and survey data. The results reveal few robust effects; however, we see a slight tendency in the results where principals who have more time for e-mail correspondence may be less likely to discriminate low-SES parents in the e-mail replies.

Growing up poor(ly): intergenerational class-based parenting logic in Singapore

ABSTRACT Class-based parenting logic transcends national culture. This is what we found when applying Laureau’s (2011. Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life with an update a decade later (2nd ed.). University of California Press) schema of concerted cultivation for middle/higher class families and accomplishment of natural growth for working-class families to young parents in Singapore. Through in-depth interviews with 10 low-SES parents and eight high-SES parents between the ages of 27 and 37, we found Laureau’s distinctions evident even in this young Asian country where the middle class has only recently emerged. Interviewing young adults at a stage in life when they were forming their parenting ideals, the intergenerational transmission of logics was apparent. So were constraints of work and earnings in shaping the intergenerational logics. The findings suggest that improving outcomes of low-SES children requires going beyond parenting programmes to tackling structures in society that harden class lines, e.g. education and work systems.

Caught by surprise: The adaptation of parental expectations after unexpected ability track placement

The study examines the adaptation of educational expectations. It focuses on the expectations that parents have of their children during the transition from primary to secondary school in Germany. During this transition, students are placed into different ability tracks. It is examined whether parents react to this information about their child's achievement by adjusting their educational expectations or whether their expectations are nonreactive to the achievement information conveyed by track placement. It is hypothesized that parents are more likely to adapt their expectations regarding final educational attainment if their child's track placement is not consistent with the expectations that they held before the track placement was known. Furthermore, SES differences in this adjustment process are expected as parents of different social status have different orientations towards achievement information. The study uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Starting Cohort 2 and focuses on the years between the third grade of primary school and fifth grade, which is the first year of secondary school. This means that students and parents can be followed across the moment in the academic career at which track placement happens. Furthermore, the variations in the tracking decisions across the German federal states is used to examine how the adaptation of parents’ expectations is affected based on how much influence parents have on track placement. Two-way fixed effect models are employed to model the change of expectations between the two time points in the data. The results show that low-SES parents do adjust their expectations more strongly downward when their children receive a lower track placement than expected; however, high-SES parents maintain their high expectations even in light of such negative achievement information. High- and low-SES parents do not significantly differ in their expectation adjustment if their children's track placement is higher than their previous expectations.

Home Learning Environments of Children in Mexico in Relation to Socioeconomic Status.

We explored the home learning environments of 173 Mexican preschool children (aged 3–6 years) in relation to their numeracy performance. Parents indicated the frequency of their formal home numeracy and literacy activities, and their academic expectations for children’s numeracy and literacy performance. Children completed measures of early numeracy skills. Mexican parent–child dyads from families with either high- or low-socioeconomic status (SES) participated. Low-SES parents (n = 99) reported higher numeracy expectations than high-SES parents (n = 74), but similar frequency of home numeracy activities. In contrast, high-SES parents reported higher frequency of literacy activities. Path analyses showed that operational (i.e., advanced) numeracy activities were positively related to children’s numeracy skills in the high- but not in the low-SES group. These findings improve the understanding of the role of the home environment in different contexts and provide some insights into the sources of the variable patterns of relations between home learning activities and children’s numeracy outcomes. They also suggest that SES is a critical factor to consider in research on children’s home numeracy experiences.

Parenting Stress and its Associated Components Prior to an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Diagnostic Evaluation.

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show increased levels of parenting stress, but only one study has examined this association before a diagnostic evaluation. We conducted a cross-sectional study of parenting stress in 317 low SES parents with children at-risk for ASD before a diagnostic evaluation. Multiple regression modeling evaluated the associations between parenting stress and parent and child factors. Parenting stress was negatively associated with social support and positively associated with active avoidance coping and parental worry. However, parenting stress was not associated with the child's ASD symptom severity or adaptive functioning, except for self-direction. Findings suggest parenting stress among parents of children at risk of ASD should be assessed prior to diagnosis.

Supporting home literacy practices in promoting Chinese parents’ engagement in their children's English education in low-SES families: An experimental study

In this experimental study, we examined the impact of a curriculum-aligned, home-based literacy activity intervention on Chinese low-SES parents’ perceived engagement in their children's English language learning. The intervention was composed of a series of take-home activities in which parents were encouraged to interact and practice with their first-grade children in English speaking, listening, reading, and writing after school. These activities were designed based on the topic and vocabulary of each story in the curriculum and were sent home electronically each week. All materials required in the activities were provided with detailed instructions in Chinese. Parents were encouraged to record or take pictures of their child's work and share with the teachers and research team. A parental engagement survey adopted from previous research was administered among 172 parents before and after the intervention in both treatment and control conditions. Results of repeated measure analysis of variance revealed that the home literacy intervention had a significant and positive effect on treatment parents’ reported engagement in their children's English language learning. Qualitative results from open-ended questions suggested that the home-based literacy activities not only supported student’ English learning outcome and parents’ English vocabulary, but also promoted students’ motivation in English learning, and fostered parent-child relationship. Implications for home-based English literacy activities in low-SES families were discussed.

Information and Trust in Parent-Teacher Cooperation – Connections with Educational Inequality

There is an ongoing debate on how parents and the cooperation between parents and teachers contribute to educational inequality. In this study, the assumption that information and trust in parent–teacher cooperation mediate the effects of parent socioeconomic status (SES) on student achievement in mathematics and instruction language (German) was examined. The effects of information and trust on achievement were assumed to be mediated by parent self-efficacy expectation in German. The hypotheses were tested using a sample with 1001 students from 4th to 6th grade and their parents in Swiss primary schools using questionnaires and achievement tests at the beginning and the end of a school year. Results from structural equation models with longitudinal data showed that parent trust and parent self-efficacy expectation fully mediated the effect of SES and student achievement in language instruction but not in mathematics. Information did not correlate with SES nor with student achievement, but with trust. Parental trust in the cooperation with teachers affected achievement in both mathematics and German. The model combines the research on parental involvement with the research on educational inequality in school. Teachers need to establish trust in cooperation with low-SES parents to reduce educational inequality in school.

What's Fair in Child Welfare? Parent Knowledge, Attitudes, and Experiences.

Parents play a critical role in the progression and outcomes of juvenile dependency (child welfare court) cases. Yet, very little is known about these parents' knowledge, attitudes, and experiences. We examined legal understanding and attitudes among 201 parents involved in ongoing dependency cases in California and Florida via semi-structured, in-person interviews. We expected parents' understanding to be low and attitudes to be negative, particularly among parents of color and low SES parents. We expected greater dependency understanding to be related to more positive justice attitudes, and procedural and distributive justice attitudes to be indistinguishable in this population. Findings partially confirmed expectations. Parents' understanding of the system was low, especially among parents of color and less educated parents. Parents felt less than satisfied about the fairness of procedures and decisions. However, procedural and distributive justice attitudes were distinguishable. Finally, and unexpectedly, parents' knowledge and attitudes were negatively related. The consistently low levels of knowledge across CA and FL suggest the critical need to increase parental knowledge. It is also important to promote fair court procedures and decision-making to improve parents' attitudes about procedural and distributive justice, which were found to be distinct and important factors among parents navigating juvenile dependency cases.

Parent Involvement, Socioeconomic Status and Reading Performance

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper was to understand whether and to what extent parenting behaviors mediated the association between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and 8-year old children’s reading performance. The study used video recordings of parent–child interactions in Danish public schools while the child was assigned a difficult reading task (N = 122). Results showed that low-SES parents tended to get involved in their children’s problem-solving activities in unconstructive ways and that this type of involvement mediated one-third of the association between parental SES and reading performance after controlling for prior measures of children’s academic skills. These results may have important implications for understanding how parents can best assist – or not assist - children in developmental activities such as homework tasks and for interventions aimed at increasing the quality of the time low SES parents spend with their children.