About this poster

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Panel information
Panel 4. Families, Parenting, and Relationships

Abstract

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Parents may experience distress and harm not only in response to discrimination against themselves personally, but also due to their children’s experiences of discrimination (Gibbons et al., 2004; Murry, 2019). Much of the existing research examining stress spillover resulting from discrimination is unidirectional, moving from parent to child (Anderson et al., 2015; Benner & Kim, 2009; Riina & McHale, 2012). However, some preliminary evidence suggests that this process may be more bidirectional than previously thought, and that discrimination stress experienced by youth may also influence their parents (Colen et al., 2019; Varner et al., 2020). Given that previous research has linked child-experienced discrimination to worse parental mental (Jelsma et al., 2022) and self-rated physical health (Holloway & Varner, 2023), and there exists a strong link between mental and physical health (Ohrnberger et al., 2017), the current study investigates pathways from child-experienced discrimination to parental self-rated health via poor mental health.
Method: Data come from the 2021 and 2022 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS), as collected by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The analytic sample includes 11,278 adults in the United States who completed one interview about their own health, as well as a separate interview about the health of one of their children under the age of 18 (adults Mage=39.77, SD=8.40; 60% female; 21% Hispanic, 57% White, 10% Black/African American, 16% Asian, 3% American Indian/Alaska Native, 7% Multiracial). Child-experienced discrimination was reported by parents with the questions “Has anyone ever treated or judged (sample child’s name) unfairly because of his/her race or ethnic group” and “Has anyone ever treated or judged (sample child’s name) unfairly because of his/her sexual orientation or gender identity”. Responses for both questions were recoded to 0 = no and 1 = yes. Parent anxiety was measured with the question “How often do you feel worried, nervous or anxious? Would you say daily, weekly, monthly, a few times a year, or never?”. Parent depression was measured with the question “How often do you feel depressed? Would you say daily, weekly, monthly, a few times a year, or never?”. Both mental health responses were recoded so higher scores reflect more anxiety and depression. Parent self-rated health was measured with the question “Would you say your health in general is excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor?”. Covariates related to children include age, sex, and race. Covariates related to parents include age, sex, race, marital status, educational attainment, and employment status. NHIS sampling weights were also included in analyses.
Results: Four percent of the sample (N=462) reported their child had experienced racial or ethnic discrimination, and 1% of the sample (N=111) reported their child had experienced sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination. Due to these low frequencies, a new variable was created to reflect if the child ever experienced either form of discrimination, which yielded N = 540 (5% of the analytic sample). Direct and indirect effects were tested with OLS regression analysis implemented in the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2017) with bootstrapped confidence intervals based on 5,000 samples. A mediation analysis was conducted to examine if child-experienced discrimination (X) affects parent health (Y) indirectly through parent anxiety (M1) and parent depression (M2). Child-experienced discrimination was positively associated with both parent anxiety (B=.31, p<.001) and parent depression (B=.32, p<.001). Child-experienced discrimination was also related to worse parental self-rated health via higher anxiety (B=.03, [.02-.04]) and higher depression (B=.06, [.04-.08]). Indirect effects accounted for 47% of the total detected effects.

Author information

Author	Role
Elizabeth Jelsma, University of Houston	Presenting author
Nema Kebbeh, University of Houston, United States	Non-presenting author

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