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Panel information
Panel 14. Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

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In the United States, socioeconomic status is a major predictor of physical and mental health, educational attainment, and children’s cognitive development (Farah, 2017). These effects are due, in part, to environmental conditions associated with the experience of poverty, including inadequate support for caregivers and subsequent impacts on their parenting (Magnuson & Duncan, 2019). For caregivers striving to offer the best possible care to their children, strained environmental conditions can limit the amount of supportive parenting they are able to provide. This is a serious problem, as supportive parenting is a robust predictor of child outcomes, including greater cognitive abilities (Prime et al., 2023). While the associations among socioeconomic status, parenting, and child outcomes are well-established, it is not yet known whether there is a threshold of family income that provides caregivers the minimal necessary resources to provide sufficient supportive parenting to young children. This research attempts to take a first step toward identifying such a threshold – a developmentally-informed poverty line. In a socially diverse sample of 398 mother-infant dyads recruited during pregnancy and longitudinally assessed through age 2 years (Luby et al., 2023), we assessed non-linear relationships between family income-to-needs ratio (INR; sample median INR=1.13, range=0.32-11.75) and observational ratings of supportive (i.e., sensitivity, positivity) and less supportive (i.e., negativity, intrusiveness) parenting behaviors when the children were 1 year old using Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). Parenting behaviors were subsequently related to child cognition assessed using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development at age 2 years to investigate the level of supportive parenting associated, on average, with adaptive developmental trajectories. Models controlled for child sex and maternal cognitive ability. Results indicated a non-linear association between INR and supportive parenting, such that higher INR was associated with higher levels of supportive parenting until an INR of 4.02 (i.e., 402% of the federal poverty line), after which increases in INR were no longer associated with increases in supportive parenting (F=3.98, p=.02). Similarly, less supportive parenting decreased as INR increased until INR was equal to or greater than 3.79 (i.e., 379% of the federal poverty line) at which point less supportive parenting no longer decreased as a function of INR (F=4.43, p<.01). Importantly, supportive parenting was a non-linear predictor of children’s cognitive development, such that increases in supportive parenting were positively related to child cognition, only at or above the sample mean of supportive parenting (F=3.66, p=.025). Findings suggest that a family income of 300% of the federal poverty line is, on average, associated with a level of supportive parenting that promotes better cognitive outcomes (Figure 1). This suggests that the current practice of setting the federal poverty line using methods that do not consider early developmental needs in families with young children fails to identify a threshold that ensures childhood thriving. Future research in larger, nationally representative samples of families with young children should seek to replicate and extend these effects to promote an empirically supported federal poverty line that minimizes inequitable child outcomes as a function of family income.

Author information

Author	Role
Max P. Herzberg, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis	Presenting author
Caroline P. Hoyniak, Washington University in St. Louis	Non-presenting author
Nancy Jiang, Washington University in St. Louis	Non-presenting author
Emily D. Gerstein, University of Missouri--Saint Louis	Non-presenting author
Rachel E. Lean, Washington University in St. Louis	Non-presenting author
Deanna M. Barch, Washington University in St. Louis	Non-presenting author
Joan L. Luby, Washington University in St. Louis	Non-presenting author

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