Community stress exposure: Youth externalizing behavior and parenting in cultural context

Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to examine the process by which families respond to community-wide stressors in different cultural contexts. Each quantitative study within this thesis investigated the role of parenting behaviors and aspects of the co-parent relationship and/or the parent-child relationship that may attenuate negative effects of exposure to stressful events across cultures and time. Using a sample of 1,293 ten-year-olds and their parents in 9 countries, Study I examined how harsh parenting mediated and parental monitoring moderated parent and child perceptions of neighborhood danger and child aggression. Although perceptions of neighborhood danger and child aggression varied between countries, both parent and child reports revealed associations between danger perceptions and aggression. Using child reports, harsh parenting mediated the relation between danger and aggression across all sites, but parent reports yielded varied relations across countries. Parental monitoring did not moderate the association between perceived danger and aggression, but also did not account for child disclosure in measuring parental monitoring. Study II of 100 Kenyan mothers and their 8-10 year old children provided a more in-depth look at violence exposure and parenting behavior over 3 years. In an acute period of intense political violence following a disputed national election, mothers rated mother and child violence exposure directly attributable to the acute sectarian violence. At 3 annual time points, mothers also completed a measure of childrearing violence. At each time point, children reported their own externalizing behavior. Exposure to short-term post-election violence was related to child externalizing behavior more than 1 year after relative calm had been restored in the community. Transactional associations were also found between child externalizing behavior and childrearing violence across 3 years. Study III included two samples of Mexican immigrant families in the United States who were interviewed about parent-child interactions and parents’ psychological acculturation. In both samples, when fathers reported a more bicultural orientation, both mothers and fathers were warmer, less aversive, and less withdrawn with their children. Study IV examined the degree to which parents supported one another in coping with stressors (dyadic coping). In 4 countries, mothers, fathers, and adolescents from 472 families were interviewed across 3 years when adolescents were, on average, 13-, 14-, and 15-years old. Maternal dyadic coping indirectly predicted child externalizing behavior from age 13 to 15, through changes in maternal warmth. Together, these 4 studies show that across time, cultures, and developmental stages, children’s externalizing behavior is predicted by experiences with community-wide stressors and related changes in parenting; co-parent or parent-child relationships may buffer or exacerbate the relation between stress exposure and maladaptive behavior in children and adolescents.