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Poverty, parental depression, parental self-efficacy, social support, and the home learning environment of toddlers : an application of the family stress model

University of British Columbia

BACKGROUND: Family poverty and the home learning environment (HLE) of toddlers both have significant impacts on children’s future cognitive and academic outcomes. Families facing poverty experience economic hardships and pressures that may lead to difficulty providing a quality HLE. The family stress model was developed to help explain how poverty influences child adjustment through economic pressure and behaviours. There is evidence of its utility in explaining the investments parents make in their children’s learning, but it is not yet known whether the family stress model may be used to predict the HLE of toddlers. In addition, two parental protective factors, parental self-efficacy and social support, may play a role in disrupting the negative effects of depression related to poverty on the HLE. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between economic hardship (low family income), economic pressure (financial difficulty), parental depression, parental self-efficacy, parental social support, and the HLE (shared book reading and story-telling) of toddlers. METHODS: We used logistic regression analysis to perform a secondary data analysis on 423 parent participants of children ages 14-24 months from the Toddler Development Instrument Phase 2 Pilot Implementation Study conducted by the Human Early Learning Partnership at the University of British Columbia. Convenience sampling was used to recruit participants from community-based organization partners across 19 communities in British Columbia, Canada. FINDINGS: After accounting for parental education and child sex, we found: 1) economic hardship and economic pressure were independently negatively associated with the HLE; 2) parental depression was negatively associated with the HLE, and appeared to fully mediate the impact of economic pressure on the HLE; 3) parental self-efficacy was positively associated with the HLE, but social support was not; 5) neither parental self-efficacy nor social support moderated the negative association between parental depression and the HLE. CONCLUSION: The family stress model predicted those families providing a higher quality HLE for toddlers, but did not predict families providing a poorer quality HLE. Economic hardship, economic pressure, parental depression, parental self-efficacy and parental education were associated with the HLE. Practitioners should focus attention on these factors when supporting family HLEs.

Text

2020-07-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/75341

Nursing

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/