In intact poor families, parents affect teenagers' well-being unequally

In poor two-parent families, fathers' emotional and physical availability to their children provides little protection from adverse adolescent outcomes. Mothers' emotional or behavioral involvement does significantly reduce the likelihood that adolescents in poor families will experience low educational and employment attainment, depression, delinquency, and childbirth or conception. However, an analysis of the effects of parental involvement on adolescent well-being in intact two-parent families indicates that both mothers' and fathers' involvement benefits adolescents in families that are not poor.

The analysis was based on longitudinal data from the National Survey of Children, a nationally representative survey of social and psychological characteristics of U. S. children. Respondents were interviewed in 1976,1981 and 1987; At the first of the three interviews, the children were aged 7-11 years; thus, the oldest respondents would have reached 22 by their third interview. In each year, both the child and one parent (mainly the mother) were interviewed.

The sample for the analysis of the effects of parental involvement on adolescent well-being consisted of 748 children (87% white and 13% nonwhite) who had lived continuously with two parents at all three interviews. The researchers divided the sample by family income reported at the 1976 and 1981 waves: Families that were poor (i.e., had an income 150% or less of the federally designated poverty level) in only one year were classified as temporarily poor (17%); those poor at both interview years were labeled persistently poor (9%); and families poor at neither time were classified as never-poor (74%). Ninety percent of the families had never received welfare.

The researchers derived two parental involvement indices from the children's interview responses in 1981. An emotional and affective scale assessed how close the adolescent felt to each parent, while a behavioral scale evaluated the extent to which the child was involved in joint activities with each parent and experienced supportive communication with each parent. The adolescents' mean scores on the emotional involvement index (out of a total of 12.0) were 10.1 for closeness with mothers and 9.8 for closeness with fathers. The mean scores on the behavioral index (out of a total of 9.0) were 76 and 7.3 for mothers and fathers, respectively.

The four measures of adolescent wellbeing (assessed at the 1987 interview) were a combined index of educational and economic achievement (with a mean of 2.1 out of a possible 5.0); a delinquency index indicating the number of times an adolescent had committed an illegal or prohibited act in the last year (a mean of 0.5 acts); a depression indicator based on responses to a series of questions on symptoms of depression (with 20% of the sample having experienced excessive symptoms); and the percentage of sexually active adolescents who had ever given birth or fathered a child (7%).

The investigators used logistic regression analysis to determine how parental involvement, especially the involvement of fathers, affected adverse outcomes in adolescence, and whether those effects varied by experience with poverty and welfare. (In the model predicting parental effects on the likelihood of an adolescent birth, the smaller sample size limited the poverty-experience comparison to neverpoor versus ever-poor.) Each of the four outcome models controlled for the child's race, age and gender, the parents' educational levels, and the degree of urbanism of the family's city of residence (a continuous variable reflecting the area's population density and degree of urbanization).

Overall, adolescents perceived their mothers to be more emotionally and physically available than their fathers, and this gender differential was especially pronounced among more persistently impoverished families. Moreover, fathers of poorer adolescents were significantly less emotionally and physically involved with their children than were fathers of nonpoor adolescents; these involvement scores declined linearly with poverty status. The same significant pattern emerged when fathers in families that had ever qualified for welfare involvement were contrasted with those in families that had never done so.

The pattern for the adolescents' mothers, however, was not as consistent: While maternal emotional involvement scores tended to increase with increasingly persistent poverty, these differences were not statistically significant. Neither were behavioral scores indicating that adolescents who had ever received welfare perceived their mothers to be significantly less supportive than did adolescents living in families that had never received welfare.

According to the results of the regression analysis, children's perception of emotional closeness with their parents had no significant impact on the adolescents' educational and economic attainment. However, more time spent with fathers, as measured by the behavioral involvement index, significantly reduced the probability of low academic and employment achievement at ages 18-22, although only in families that were not poor and that had never received welfare. Mothers' supportive interaction with their children, on the other hand, had a significant impact in impoverished families: In persistently poor families and in welfare families, the more involved mothers were in activities with their children, the greater their children's educational and economic achievement.

The researchers found that fathers emotional involvement with their adolescents-but not their behavioral involvement-had a buffering effect on the incidence of delinquency in persistently poor families only (each unit increase lowered the level on the delinquency scale by 0.22). While adolescents who felt especially close to their mother were also significantly less likely to report delinquent behavior, that effect was significant only among adolescents who were not poor and was small.

Regardless of poverty status, children who felt especially close to their father were significantly less likely to show symptoms of depression (each unit increase in the father's emotional scale reduced the likelihood of depression by 15% in never-poor families and by 21% in temporarily poor families). In contrast, only in families that ever received welfare did the likelihood of depression in adolescence decrease if the teenager spent more quality time with his or her mother (each unit increase in the behavioral scale lowered the probability by 38%).

Finally, there was a clear difference between mothers and fathers in the effect of parental relationships on the likelihood of an adolescent birth: While fathers had no significant impact on this outcome, strong emotional bonds with the mother lowered the probability of an adolescent birth both in families that were never poor (by 23%) and in families that had ever received welfare (by 38%). Moreover, poor adolescents who enjoyed more activities and supportive communication with their mother were significantly less likely to have given birth or to have fathered a child (reduction of 34% for each unit increase in the behavioral involvement scale.)

The investigators assert that fathers' involvement with their children provided fewer buffering effects to later adverse outcomes in poor families than did mothers' involvement: Only in persistently poor families was the risk of delinquent behavior significantly affected by fathers' emotional involvement, while mothers' involvement had a significant impact in poor families and on those that had ever qualified for welfare in three of the four adverse adolescent outcomes studied. Thus, according to the researchers, "the greater involvement of mothers can play a much more critical role in protecting youth from the adverse outcomes and risky behaviors that are associated with poverty and welfare receipt."

In families that were not poor, in contrast, adolescents benefited from closeness and time spent with at least one parent to a different degree for each outcome. The investigators contend that when each parent's influence on adolescent well-being varies by poverty experience, that effect tends to be stronger in poorer families. For example, mothers' involvement increases teenagers' educational and economic outcomes in poor families more than fathers' involvement does in nonpoor families. In their attempt to explain why fathers in intact poor families were not more influential compared with mothers, the researchers point to the possibility that other, more traditional, dimensions of parental involvement not measured in their study-such as disciplining and setting 'mits-may be more important in impoverished households. They also acknowledge the likelihood that these effects may differ by gender, in that mothers might be more likely to influence daughters more on some matters, while fathers might exert more influence over sons in others. The investigators concede, however, that their sample size was too small to separate out gender effects according to families' experience of poverty.

Reference

1. K. M. Harris and J. K. Marmer "Poverty, Paternal Involvement, and Adolescent Well-Being," Journal of Family Issues, 17:614-6401996.

Copyright The Alan Guttmacher Institute Mar/Apr 1997
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