‘Poor Parents, Poor Parenting?’

A presentation given by Principal Researcher Judy Corlyon to the Parents on the Breadline Conference, Edinburgh 10th November 2010.

The Presentations is reproduced below, or you can download it as a pdf in the sidebar.

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Poor Parents, Poor Parenting?

Presentation to the Parents on the Breadline Conference, Edinburgh

Background

Recent years have seen growing political interest in tackling poverty in Britain and its negative impact on children and parents. In March 1999 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, declared the Labour Government’s intention to eliminate child poverty by 2020, with commitments to reduce it by a quarter by 2004 and by a half by 2010/2011. The intermediate target of reducing child poverty by a quarter by 2004/05, compared with the 1998/99 level, was not met.  Meanwhile, the Child Poverty Act 2010, which received Royal Assent on 25 March 2010, fulfilled his Government’s commitment made in September 2008 to enshrine the 2020 child poverty target in legislation. The Act requires the Secretary of State to meet four targets to eradicate child poverty by 2020. It requires a national strategy every three years (the first being in March 2011) to meet these targets and report annually on progress.¹

Concern about child poverty has been driven not only by a desire to combat inequality and disadvantage, but also by increasing recognition that the life chances of materially deprived children are far more limited than those of wealthier families.

The major themes of much recent research on child poverty, as well as policy, have included measurement, child outcomes and the ways in which the ‘cycle of poverty’ can be broken (Ermisch et al., 2001; Yaqub, 2002). The role of parents in the relationship between poverty and outcomes for children is less well understood.

Parents living in poverty are more likely than more affluent parents to be facing a range of issues other than material deprivation which may affect their parenting. These include low levels of education and few qualifications, lack of access to jobs and services, isolation, mental and physical ill health and domestic violence. These factors may act independently of each other but are also likely to interact, so that disaggregating their effect on parenting – and on outcomes for children – is extremely challenging. We also know relatively less about the different ways that

parents in poverty cope, as opposed to the negative aspects of parenting under stress that place children at risk of poor outcomes. In particular, our understanding is still limited as to whether and how far ‘good’ parenting mediates the effects of poverty on children.

Children living in poverty

If housing costs are taken into account – and this is particularly relevant for families in low-paid employment whose housing costs are not  paid by the state – the latest available figures (for 2008/09) show that there were nearly 4 million children in the UK classed as being in poverty. However, the standard Government measure looks at income before housing costs and this reduces the number to 2.8 million children. This does represent a reduction of 0.1m from the previous year, but the aim was to reduce the number to 1.7 million in 2010–11.  As with the 2004 target, this one looks unlikely to be met.

Media depiction of poor families often centres on those headed by a lone parent and/or those in which no adult is in employment.   However, latest official figures show that 61% of children in low income households live in families headed by a couple. And more than half (58%) live in families where at least one adult works (DWP, 2009)

Definitions of poverty

The four income-based UK-wide targets set out in the Child Poverty Act to be met by 2020 are based on the proportion of children living in:

• Absolute low income (whether the poorest families are seeing their income rise in real terms)
• Relative low income (whether the incomes of the poorest families are keeping pace with the growth of incomes in the economy as a whole)
• Combined low income and material deprivation (a wider measure of people’s living standards)
• Persistent poverty (length of time in poverty)

Absolute poverty/low incomenormally refers to a state in which income is insufficient toprovide the basic needs required to sustain life (i.e. to feed and shelter children).

Relative poverty/low incomeis more widely used and defines income or resources in relation to the average. The official definition in the UK is 60% of contemporary median equivalised household income (DWP, 2003a, 2003b). Relative poverty may also refer to the wider implications of living in poverty, such as the inability to participate or contribute to society on an equal basis because of a lack of sufficient income.

Material deprivation is a more recent measure and is useful in illustrating what it really means to have a low income. The absence of the following items is one of the yardsticks for measuring children’s deprivation (DWP, 2006): 

• 1 week’s holiday a year away from home with the family
• Swimming at least once a month
• A hobby or leisure activity
• Friends round for tea or a snack once a fortnight
• Not sharing a bedroom with a sibling of the opposite sex if aged 10 and over
• Leisure equipment (e.g. sports equipment or bicycle)
• Celebrations on special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas or other religious festivals
• Play group/nursery/toddler group at least once a week
• A school trip at least once a term

For adults, not being materially deprived means:

• Home adequately warm and in decent state of repair
• Two pairs of all-weather shoes for each adult
• Yearly 1-week holiday away, not with relatives
• Replacing worn out furniture
• A small amount of money to spend on self each week
• Regular savings (of £10 a month) for rainy days or retirement
• Home contents insurance
• Friends or family for a drink/meal at least once a month
• A hobby or leisure activity
• Replacing/repairing broken electrical goods

What constitutes ‘good’ parenting?

The actual activities undertaken by parents vary considerably among different social groups and between individuals, so there are many different views of what makes for ‘good’ parenting.

According to Baumrind (1971, 1991) the ideal is authoritative parenting, where parents are demanding but also responsive to their children. This is in contrast to either the permissive approach where parents are more responsive than demanding or authoritarian where they are demanding and directive but not responsive .

In all cultures, parents with lower incomes tend to be authoritarian (Hoff et al.,2002).

In terms of what influences parenting style, a major theoretical advance in the last half-century was provided by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Belsky, 1984). The ecological model takes a systems perspective, and provides a framework for understanding how factors that impinge on parents and children nest together within a hierarchy of four levels; socio-cultural (macro system), community (exo system), family (micro system) and individual (ontogenic). Belsky and Vondra (1989) propose that adequate parenting stems from interacting, interdependent sources:

• Contextual sources of stress and support
• Family and child characteristics
• Parents’ developmental history and own psychological resources

Theories about parenting and poverty

The main theories discussed here are:

• stress
• culture of poverty
• environment or neighbourhood.

None of these claims that income differences are the only determinant of parenting capacity, and none claim that poverty has no effect on parenting.

1. The stress theory

This is the most prevalent and intuitive theory of the relationship between parenting and poverty.

Recent research by Waylen and Stewart Brown (2008) looked at parents in different social and cultural groups who all had young children. They found that factors such as poor health, lack of social support and financial hardship all individually could have a negative impact on parenting but the cumulative effect of all three together made parenting – and producing good outcomes for children – even more difficult. The interesting point from this study is that when the parents’ financial situation got worse, so did their parenting score, albeit not by a great deal.  However, more money or more social support did not lead to improvement.  What did have a positive effect was improving the mothers’ mental and physical health.

This illustrates the stress theory – that living on a low income brings a number of anxieties and stresses (about basic things such as housing and food) not faced by more affluent parents, and these in turn bring depression and irritability.  This can lead to unpredictable and inconsistent parenting which has an adverse effect on outcomes for children. 

Raising the income level, and especially by the small amount that is usually associated with welfare benefits, does not bring about an improvement because there are other factors at play.

A further factor to be taken into account is the extent to which children themselves might add to parents’ stress.  Research by Deater-Deckard (2004) found that children with behavioural difficulties or serious illness are major causes of parenting stress.

2. The culture of poverty

Two pieces of research carried out a few years ago pointed to a cultural explanation of poverty. The research by Ermisch and others (2001), done in the UK using existing data, considered that children living in poverty are likely to have fewer opportunities for success because their families have lower expectations of work and education.  They haveless likelihood of employment and a greater propensity for early motherhood.

Yaqub’s research (2002) looked at poverty in several countries and found that people’s class, education and health are similar to those of their parents and siblings. But he stressed that outcomes are not governed solely by childhood experiences and that resilient people can move out of this cycle of intergenerational transmission.

This is seen as an area worthy of further investigation. Hobcraft (1998) pointed out that

However, some 30 years ago a report of a major study of transmitted deprivation, which specifically addressed this issue, was published (Rutter and Madge, 1978). Social policy research so often has its own Groundhog Day…

The culture of poverty theory is used now only in a derogatory way but it was originally formulated to highlight the resilience and creativeness of people in poverty and to counter a view that poor people do not have a culture. According to the theory, poor people have a different culture from middle-class parents – one in which low achievement persists across the generations so that poor people can never be upwardly mobile. Such parents, it is believed, have no commitment to working, low expectations for their children and do not help them, do not value individual attainment and use harsh or inconsistent punishment.  In doing this, they are replicating the basic parenting style they experienced as children. Consequently, changing their financial position or environment will not make a difference as the only solution is to change attitudes and the style of parenting.

This view appears to retain currency among member of the current Coalition Government. In August last year Nick Clegg, who did not come from a disadvantaged background, stated that:

Not with standing a very busy day at Westminster, it is unlikely that Mr Clegg comes home in the evening to find Mrs Clegg wondering how she can afford to feed the children that night, a factor which might distract them both from making sure the children have done their reading practice.

What Mr Clegg failed to elaborate on was the role of more affluent parents who use the means at their disposal to make sure that their children, in turn, have access to power and privilege.

3. The neighbourhood theory

The third and final research area looks at some studies concerned with the effect of environment on ability to parent effectively. There have been two interesting experiments in the United States recently. In the first, families living in public housing in poor neighbourhoods were randomly allocated to stay in the neighbourhood or to move to ‘near poor’ or ‘non-poor’ neighbourhoods. The research found that moving from a poor neighbourhood significantly improved the mental health of mothers and that their children were significantly less likely to report problems related to anxiety and depression (Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2003).

But in a more recent experiment (Moving to Opportunity) where parents were randomly assigned vouchers that enabled them move to better neighbourhoods, the children in families which moved did not fare any better than those in families which did not (Sanbonmatsu et al., 2006).

This type of social experimentation tends not to find favour in the UK, but we do have relevant information from two recent studies in this country which specifically focused on parents living in poor neighbourhoods. Ghate and Hazel (2002) surveyed a random sample of parents living in poor environments in the UK about their parenting style, the range of problems they faced, and difficulties with children and family, and conducted qualitative interviews with some of them to explore how they coped with adversity. They found that the poorer the area, the more likely parents were to have mental and emotional problems. Because they only studied parents in poor environments, the authors could only partially address the question of whether it is worse to be a poor parent in a poor area than a poor parent in a more affluent area. However, their overall conclusion was that: … ‘parenting in poor environments is a more “risky” business than parenting elsewhere, and it gets riskier the poorer the area.’ (Ghate and Hazel, 2002, p.101).

Jacqueline Barnes (2004) carried out an in-depth study with parents in four English neighbourhoods, three of which were deprived, including one inner-city area.  She found that parents in the deprived areas were under more stress than those in the better-off area, their approach to parenting was not as progressive as it was among parents in the affluent area, and their children had more behavioural difficulties. Interestingly, while other research has highlighted more harsh measures of discipline in poor areas, this was only obvious in the inner-city area, not in the other two disadvantaged areas which in this respect were similar to the better-off one.

The over-riding finding from these studies is that most parents cope well when living in adversity, not because poverty and deprivation are insignificant, but because most parents in poor environments possess skills at managing these stressors effectively.

The neighbourhood theory does not stand alone, but rather adds to the previous theories.  Neighbourhood does have some effect on parenting but it is not as significant as other factors, such as personal characteristics, background and other family factors and circumstances.

Conclusion

Though the available studies tell us a reasonable amount about the links between parenting and poverty, there are some limitations to the information we have.

• They tend to focus on employment or lack of it – that is, on current income. We are not usually afforded a full picture of parents’ circumstances, including debt, savings and help from the extended family which can all make a difference, positively or negatively.
• They do not look at the effects of people moving in and out of poverty, or how poor they have been for how long.
• There is limited information about how being poor affects the parenting of children in different age groups.
• As always in studies of parents, the research is usually about mothers. There is not a great deal of information on fathers’ parenting role.

Not with standing these shortcomings, some conclusions can be drawn from the available data.

There is no clear-cut causal link between poverty and parenting. Rather, it is likely that different individuals respond in different ways to financial hardship. Factors such as family structure, neighbourhood and social support interact with parents’ temperaments, beliefs and their own experiences of parenting. The main influence of poverty on parenting seems to be that it causes some parents to be more stressed, depressed or irritable, and this, in turn, disrupts their parenting practices and styles. It is the disrupted parenting, rather than poverty itself, which appears to be the major factor affecting outcomes for children. 

It is not clear if improved outcomes come from improved parenting or from access to things such as better housing. Most likely it is from a combination of the two. 

A key finding here is that the majority of parents in poverty (like those living in relative affluence) possess adequate parenting capacity. This belies any assumption that poverty is necessarily associated with a lack of parenting capacity. Despite what some tabloid newspapers would have us believe, we are talking about a small minority of people whose parenting is affected by being poor.

In terms of future interventions, the evidence suggests that giving poor parents small financial increases through welfare benefits is unlikely to make a significant difference. Rather, supporting mothers so that they are not so stressed and depressed and can cope better with their children is most likely to have a positive effect.

As we know from evaluations of parenting courses, parenting skills can successfully be taught, so the expansion of parenting courses looks like a desirable route. However, evaluations also point to the fact that poorer parents are the ones least likely to access services, suggesting that targeted rather than universal interventions might be called for.

Judy Corlyon

— 10th November 2010

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References

_{Barnes, J. (2004) Place and Parenting: A Study of Four Communities: The Relevance of Community Characteristics and Residents’ Perceptions of Their Neighbourhoods for Parenting and Child Behaviour in Four Contrasting Locations. Final Report of the Families and Neighbourhoods Study (FANS) Submitted to the NSPCC. Part 1:Quantitative Results. London: NSPCC}

_{Baumrind, D. (1971) ‘Current patterns of parental authority’, Developmental}

_{Psychology Monographs, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 1–103}

_{Baumrind, D. (1991) ‘The influence of parenting style on adolescent competence and substance use’, Journal of Early Adolescence, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 56–95}

_{Belsky, J. (1984) ‘The determinants of parenting: a process model’, Child}

_{Development, Vol. 55, pp. 83–96}

_{Belsky, J. and Vondra, I. (1989) ‘Lessons from child abuse: the determinants of parenting’, in D. Cicchetti and V. Carlson (eds) Child Maltreatment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 153–202}

_{Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press}

_{Deater-Deckard, K. (2004) Parenting Stress. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press}

_{DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) (2003a) Measuring Child Poverty. London:}

_{DWP (2003b) Opportunity for All: Fifth Annual Report 2003, Cm 5956.}

_{DWP (2006) Measuring child poverty using material deprivation: possible approaches}

_{DWP (2009, updated September 2010) Households Below Average Income}

_{Ermisch, J., Francesconi, M. and Pevalin, D. J. (2001) Outcomes for Children of Poverty, DWP Research Report No. 158. Leeds: HMSO}

_{Ghate, D. and Hazel, N. (2002) Parenting in Poor Environments: Stress, Support and Coping. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers}

_{Hobcraft, J. (1998) Intergenerational and Life Course Transmission of Social}

_{Exclusion: Influences of Childhood Poverty, Family Disruption, and Contact with thePolice, CASE Paper 15. London: London School of Economics, STICERD}

_{Hoff, E., Laursen, B. and Tardif, T. (2002) ‘Socioeconomic status and parenting’, in M. Bornstein (ed.) Handbook of Parenting, Volume 2, 2nd edn. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates}

_{Leventhal, T. and Brooks-Gunn, J. (2003) ‘Moving to opportunity: an experimental study of neighborhood effects on mental health’, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 93, No. 9, pp. 1576–82}

_{Rutter, M. and Madge, N. (1978) ‘Cycles of disadvantage: a review of research’, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 489–90}

_{Sanbonmatsu, L., Kling, J. R., Duncan, G. J. and Brooks-Gunn, J. (2006)}

_{Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment, NBER Working Paper No. 11909. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research}

_{Waylen, A. and Stewart Brown, S. (2008)Parenting in ordinary families}

_{Diversity, complexity and change.  Joseph Rowntree Foundation}

_{Yaqub, S. (2002) ‘Poor children grow into poor adults: harmful mechanism or overdeterministic theory?’, Journal of International Development, Vol. 14, pp. 1081–93}

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