Socioeconomic disadvantage and child development.

Recent research consistently reports that persistent poverty has more detrimental effects on IQ, school achievement, and socioemotional functioning than transitory poverty, with children experiencing both types of poverty generally doing less well than never-poor children. Higher rates of perinatal complications, reduced access to resources that buffer the negative effects of perinatal complications, increased exposure to lead, and less home-based cognitive stimulation partly account for diminished cognitive functioning in poor children. These factors, along with lower teacher expectancies and poorer academic-readiness skills, also appear to contribute to lower levels of school achievement among poor children. The link between socioeconomic disadvantage and children's socioemotional functioning appears to be mediated partly by harsh, inconsistent parenting and elevated exposure to acute and chronic stressors. The implications of research findings for practice and policy are considered.

Unemployment and work interruption among African American single mothers: effects on parenting and adolescent socioemotional functioning.

Using interview data from a sample of 241 single African American mothers and their seventh- and eighth-grade children, this study tests a model of how 2 economic stressors, maternal unemployment and work interruption, influence adolescent socioemotional functioning. In general, these economic stressors affected adolescent socioemotional functioning indirectly, rather than directly, through their impact on mothers' psychological functioning and, in turn, parenting behavior and mother-child relations. Current unemployment, but not past work interruption, had a direct effect on depressive symptomatology in mothers. As expected, depressive symptomatology in mothers predicted more frequent maternal punishment of adolescents, and this relation was fully mediated by mothers' negative perceptions of the maternal role. More frequent maternal punishment was associated with increased cognitive distress and depressive symptoms in adolescents, and consistent with predictions, these relations were partially mediated by adolescents' perceptions of the quality of relations with their mothers. Increased availability of instrumental support, as perceived by mothers, predicted fewer depressive symptoms in mothers, less punishment of adolescents, and less negativity about the maternal role. Both economic stressors were associated with higher levels of perceived financial strain in mothers, which in turn predicted adolescents' perceptions of economic hardship. Adolescents who perceived their families as experiencing more severe economic hardship reported higher anxiety, more cognitive distress, and lower self-esteem.

Children and poverty: issues in contemporary research.

The state-of-the-art research in this volume is based on complex, multidimensional conceptions of poverty. Current research goes beyond description to emphasize analysis of processes by which effects occur and variations in effects associated with race, gender, and ethnicity. Child care, school, neighborhood, and community are studied as well as family contexts. The child outcomes investigated include both intellectual development and socioemotional functioning. It is multidisciplinary, using a broad range of analytic frameworks and research methods from economics, sociology, health, psychology, and other disciplines. In this introduction, the overall research trends are described, and new questions for future research are identified.

The impact of economic hardship on black families and children: psychological distress, parenting, and socioemotional development.

Family processes affecting the socioemotional functioning of children living in poor families and families experiencing economic decline are reviewed. Black children are of primary interest in the article because they experience disproportionate shares of the burden of poverty and economic loss and are at substantially higher risk than white children of experiencing attendant socioemotional problems. It is argued that (a) poverty and economic loss diminish the capacity for supportive, consistent, and involved parenting and render parents more vulnerable to the debilitating effects of negative life events, (b) a major mediator of the link between economic hardship and parenting behavior is psychological distress deriving from an excess of negative life events, undesirable chronic conditions, and the absence and disruption of marital bonds, (c) economic hardship adversely affects children's socioemotional functioning in part through its impact on the parent's behavior toward the child, and (d) father-child relations under conditions of economic hardship depend on the quality of relations between the mother and father. The extent to which psychological distress is a source of race differences in parenting behavior is considered. Finally, attention is given to the mechanisms by which parents' social networks reduce emotional strain, lessen the tendency toward punitive, coercive, and inconsistent parenting behavior, and, in turn, foster positive socioemotional development in economically deprived children.

Maternal behavior, social support, and economic conditions as predictors of distress in children.

Economic hardship diminishes psychological well-being and the capacity for supportive parenting. Single mothers' coping behavior, psychological functioning, and communications to the child about financial matters and personal problems predict the degree of psychological distress experienced by their children.

The short-term dynamics of social organization in preschool triads.

Sequential dependencies in solitary and interactive states of social organization were examined as a function of age, sex, and type of toy in 12 triads of 3 1/2- and 5-year-old children. Each triad was observed during 2 30-min sessions, one in which objects with highly specific functions (e.g., dolls, trucks) were available, and one in which objects with relatively ambiguous functions (e.g., pipe cleaners, cardboard cylinders) were present. The results indicated that, while old and young triads did not differ in the tendency to initiate triadic interaction when the preceding state was solitary, old triads were more likely than young triads to maintain the triadic state and to shift to that state from the dyadic state. Boy triads were more likely than girl triads to remain in a solitary state and less likely to shift to and remain in a dyadic state, though no sex difference was found in the transition probabilities when the preceding state was triadic. Triads were more likely to remain in a solitary state in the presence of high-specificity toys than in the presence of low-specificity toys. Verbal metacommunication was more frequent among old triads than young triads, and it facilitated maintenance, but not initiation, of interactive states. The distinction between initiation and maintenance tendencies was formalized in a Markov model of the dynamics of social organization, and the parameter estimates yielded by the model were used to provide a simplified description of the "main" effects of age, sex, and type of toy. It is argued that models such as this one are useful in circumventing certain restrictions on the possible interpretations of raw sequential statistics.