Risk and Resilience in Low-Income Families: Linking Contextual Risks, Parenting Styles, Child Emotion Regulation, Maltreatment, and Early Head Start

Abstract

Parenting is one of the most salient influences in children's development, particularly during early childhood. Substantial theoretical and empirical evidence has linked sociodemographic risk to compromised parenting, and has contributed to the development of two-generation programs to support low-income parents and their young children. Despite decades of research on these families, little is known about how styles of parenting change across time, how children's emotion regulation influences parenting styles, or how risks predict longitudinal stability and change to parenting. Furthermore, it is unclear how one two-generation program, Early Head Start, promotes positive parenting styles and buffers against contextual risks. The aim of the three papers in this dissertation study is to describe maternal parenting within a low-income sample, by linking longitudinal trajectories of parenting to contextual risks, Early Head Start, children's emotion regulation (ER), and risk for child maltreatment. Guided by the bioecological model, and components specific to the Ecological-Transactional Model of Child Maltreatment (Cicchetti et al., 2010), these three papers indicate specific risks that are most salient to exhibiting unsupportive parenting behaviors: family conflict, maternal depression, and attitudes and beliefs that indicate risk for child physical abuse. Furthermore, the papers highlight important methodological considerations for the study of parenting at risk, children's ER, as well as for clinicians assessing risk. The three papers, collectively, highlight the complex interplay of determinants of parenting, including sociodemographic characteristics, psychological factors, interpersonal relationships, child effects, family-level characteristics, and Early Head Start involvement.