When parents try to protect their children from financial hardship, they might be doing them a favor: teenagers’ views about their families’ economic challenges are related to their mental health and behavior.
This is the principal finding of a study of household income and child development that I recently conducted with my colleagues.
How professor of psychologyI know it exists loads of research showing that young people experience greater economic hardship throughout the household have more behavioral problems.
However, most research on this topic relies largely on caregiver reports – what adults say about their children. Fewer researchers have asked this query of young people themselves.
To fill this gap, my colleagues and I asked greater than 100 Pittsburgh-area teenagers and their parents about their family income, views on financial problems, and mental health. We checked in with them multiple times over the course of nine months.
While doing this, we found some vital things. First, we found that many families’ economic circumstances modified over time – some months they were doing well with money and others they were struggling. Second, we found that when teens said they and their families were experiencing difficulties, they’d more behavior problems.
For example, many teenagers said they couldn’t afford school supplies or that their caregivers apprehensive about not having enough money for necessities. During the months in which teens reported experiencing such difficulties, they were more likely to grow to be depressed and have trouble at college.
Why is it vital?
Other researchers have found that economic hardship is related to differences in parenting, academic achievements and many other developmental effects – but previous research has not at all times taken under consideration the complexities and challenges faced by struggling families.
For example, researchers examining the links between economic hardship and adolescent behavioral development have historically checked out family income on an annual basis. But bills are payable weekly or monthly. Our work shows that by looking only at annual data, we risk missing a crucial a part of the story: many families experience short periods of financial instability.
Our work also shows that teenagers feel strongly influenced by economic conditions in their day by day lives and understand the situation of their families. This has vital implications for research. Given that adolescence is a time of major emotional and cognitive changes, our team believes that researchers should deal with the perspectives of young people directly affected by economic challenges. For example, we’ve previously found that the way in which young people perceive stress and support in their lives can influence their brain development.
This work also has vital implications for public policy. For example, lawmakers assume that economic hardship is fairly stable and set anti-poverty policies accordingly. Our research provides new evidence that many individuals are seeing large fluctuations in income all year long. This sort of economic instability has been found to exist influence the kid’s developmentespecially when they are families lose loads of income. To reduce the impact of poverty, policymakers might have to think more dynamically about economic hardship.
What’s next
Our research team wants to proceed to put young people’s voices at the middle. We are also interested in more complex ways of explaining socioeconomic status. While we know that income matters to families, we are increasingly specializing in household assets, which is the household’s assets minus its debts. Wealth can influence a baby’s development in ways apart from income. We are just starting to collect data for a new project examining the impact of each of those aspects impact adolescents’ mental health.
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