A new study suggests that for some of their parents, living in poor neighborhoods is associated with poorer mental health, poorer family relations, and less consistent and more punitive parenting.
The study aimed to determine the relationships between neighborhood characteristics and parenting, and between parenting and children's preschool performance.
Conducted by researchers at the University of Ottawa, Johns Hopkins University, the University of British Columbia, and Statistics Canada, the study appears in the January/February 2008 issue of Child Development.
“This study does not show that poverty leads to bad parenting, which in turn leads to poor outcomes in children,” according to Dafna E. Kohen, adjunct professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa, senior research analyst at Statistics Canada, and the study's lead author. “Rather, this study shows that in neighborhoods where there is socioeconomic disadvantage, children's verbal and behavioral outcomes are influenced by poor parental mental health and parenting behaviors.”
Children's neighborhoods play an important role in their development, yet little is known about how the characteristics of those neighborhoods affect young children. Existing research suggests that children who live in poor neighborhoods are at greater risk of problems when entering school and of behavioral and emotional difficulties. This study goes beyond the existing evidence to explore characteristics of neighborhoods and how those characteristics relate to the well-being of parents and children.
The study examined 3,528 preschoolers from a nationally representative sample of Canadian children. Specifically, the researchers looked at characteristics such as neighborhood cohesion, or the sense of trust among neighbors, and the sense of community organization (whether or not residents can get together to address community issues or problems, for example). They also looked at family factors such as mothers' mental health and how families function, and parenting behaviors such as reading and discipline. And they measured the children's verbal ability and assessed how their parents rated their children's behavior.