Poverty and Parenting: Exploring Differences Between Material Hardship and Income Poverty

Parenting practices matter for child well-being. It is important, therefore, to understand how economic deprivation influences positive and negative parenting practices. This study explored how income poverty and material hardship predict parental responsiveness and harsh discipline practices. Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) when children were 3 and 5 years old, we employed cross-sectional linear regression to examine the associations between income poverty and material hardship and parental responsiveness and parental discipline at age 3 and at age 5, and we used family fixed effects models to examine whether within-family changes in income poverty and material hardship predicted changes in parental responsiveness and parental discipline between ages 3 and 5. Results of the cross-sectional models suggest that income poverty had a more consistent, detrimental impact on parenting practices, particularly discipline behaviours, than did material hardship. Results of the fixed effects models indicated that neither changes in income poverty nor material hardship predicted statistically significant changes in parenting practices. Results suggest that interventions reducing income poverty could be effective at improving parenting practices but that other factors, perhaps contextual and structural, may be more important than family-level economic precarity in shaping responsive and harsh parenting and, subsequently, child well-being.