Child effects on positive parenting vary with neighborhood opportunity

Prior theoretical and empirical research has highlighted links between positive parenting and the socioeconomic characteristics of the family's neighborhood, but has yet to illuminate the etiologic origins of this association. One possibility is that the various predictors of parenting outlined by Belsky (1984; e.g., characteristics of the child, characteristics of the parent, and contextual influences) may matter more in some neighborhood contexts than in others. To examine this possibility, we conducted etiologic moderation analyses in a sample of 1,030 families of twins (average age 8 years; 51% male, 49% female; racial composition: 82% White, 10% Black, 1% Asian, 1% Indigenous, and 6% multiracial) from the Twin Study of Behavioral and Emotional Development in Children in the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Neighborhood and parenting were assessed using multiple informants and assessment strategies (neighborhood and family informants, administrative data, and videotaped parent-child interactions). Results pointed to strong evidence of etiologic moderation, such that child effects on positive mothering were prominent in neighborhoods with little opportunity and near zero in neighborhoods with ample opportunity. Such findings not only reframe the magnitude of child effects on the parenting they receive as context-dependent, but also indicate that mothers in impoverished neighborhoods may be more responsive to their children's characteristics than mothers in neighborhoods with ample opportunity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Cognitive reframing · Context (archaeology · Developmental psychology · Geography · MEDLINE · Moderation · Parenting styles · Population · PsycINFO · Socialization · Socioeconomic status · Demography · Psychology · Social Psychology · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

• How do parents' subjective perceptions about the built and social environments relate to objective indicators of the built environment? Investigating direct associations between major context factors of children's mobility

  Open Access•David Hoelzel, David J Hoelzel et al.•Cities•2025

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