Abstract:
Parenting is often accompanied by everyday trials, and families living in poverty and in communities lacking resources tend to experience more daily struggles than others. Extant research on poverty and parenting overwhelmingly focuses on child outcomes, such as school readiness and emotion regulation, and neglects the impact of parenting strategies and child emotion regulation on parent well-being (e.g., mental health and stress). Furthermore, there is a dearth of studies comparing the influence of ecological factors, including family- and community-level variables, on parent well-being and child emotion regulation. Thus, the purpose of this study was twofold: 1) to determine whether children’s emotion regulation mediates the relation between parenting strategies and parent well-being, and 2) to examine whether family or community factors moderate the relation between parenting strategies and children’s emotion regulation. Analyses were conducted using a subset of data collected from a larger longitudinal study of Head Start families in the Southeastern United States.
