When parents attempt to shield their kids from financial hardship, they might be doing them a favor: Teens’ views about their families’ economic challenges are connected to their mental health and behavior.
That’s the fundamental finding of a study into household income and child development that I recently conducted with my colleagues.
As a professor of psychologyI do know there’s a great deal of research showing that young individuals who experience more household economic hardship are likely to have more behavioral problems.
But most studies on this issue rely heavily on caregiver reports – that’s, what adults say about their kids. Fewer researchers have asked young people themselves.
To fill this gap, my colleagues and I asked greater than 100 Pittsburgh-area teenagers, in addition to their parents, about their family income, their views about their financial challenges, and their mental health. We checked in with them multiple times over nine months.
Doing this, we found a number of necessary things. First, we found that many families’ economic situations varied over time – they were doing nice with money in some months and struggling during others. And second, we found that when teenagers said they and their family were experiencing hardship, those teens had more behavioral problems.
For example, many teens said that they couldn’t afford school supplies or that their caregivers anxious because they lacked money for necessities. In the months when teens reported experiencing these hardships, they were more prone to feel depressed and get in trouble at college.
Why it matters
Other researchers have found that economic hardship is expounded to differences in parenting, academic achievement and plenty of other developmental outcomes – but prior studies haven’t all the time captured the complexities and challenges that struggling families face.
For example, researchers studying links between economic hardship and youth behavioral development have historically checked out family income on a yearly basis. But bills come due weekly or monthly. Our work shows that taking a look at the annual data alone risks missing a crucial a part of the story: Many families experience temporary spells of economic instability.
Our work also shows that teens are acutely affected by economic conditions of their day by day lives and understand their families’ circumstances. This has necessary implications for research. Given that adolescence is a time of major emotional and cognitive changes, our team believes that researchers should center on the perspectives of young people directly affected by economic challenges. For example, we’ve previously found that how young people view stress and support of their lives can have implications for his or her brain development.
This work also has necessary implications for public policy. For example, lawmakers assume that economic hardship is fairly stable and set anti-poverty policies accordingly. Our research offers fresh evidence that many individuals see large income swings all year long. This form of economic instability has been found to affect child developmentespecially when families lose large amounts of income. To lessen the impact of poverty, policymakers may have to take into consideration economic hardship more dynamically.
What’s next
Our research team desires to proceed putting young people’s voices front and center. We’re also concerned about more complex ways to make sense of socioeconomic status. While we all know that income matters for families, we’re increasingly focused on household wealth, which is a household’s assets minus its debts. Wealth may influence child development in ways which are different from income. We’re just beginning to collect data for a brand new project examining how each of those aspects affect teen mental health.
The Research Brief is a brief tackle interesting academic work.