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Associations between Material Hardship, Mental Health, and Children’s Educational Achievement among Families Experiencing Maternal Unemployment During the Great Recession
Frauenholtz, Susan
Frauenholtz, Susan
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Abstract
The Great Recession was the largest American economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment reached historically high levels and an unprecedented number of children resided with one or more unemployed parents. Because of its vast scope, the Great Recession provides an unusual opportunity to study the effects of parental unemployment on child and family wellbeing. The Family Economic Stress Model (FESM) posits that the strain resulting from an economic crisis such as unemployment will create a chain of associations including material hardship, impaired parent mental health, harsh parenting, and deleterious child outcomes including mental health distress and reduced educational achievement. Utilizing the FESM as its theoretical foundation, this dissertation study conducted a path analysis to investigate the associations between unemployment length, material hardship, parent and child mental health, harsh parenting, and educational achievement. The study sample consisted of 536 families with an unemployed mother who participated in the fifth wave of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study, which coincided with the Great Recession. Results provided support for use of the FESM in understanding the experience of families with unemployed mothers during the Great Recession. Length of unemployment was not associated with any of the other study variables. However, material hardship was associated with maternal depression, which in turn was associated with children’s socioemotional symptoms indirectly through harsh parenting. Finally, children’s socioemotional symptoms were associated with math achievement. Implications for social work policy, practice, education and research are discussed.
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2017-01-01
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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Frauenholtz_ku_0099D_15117_DATA_1.pdf
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Keywords
Mental health, Children's educational achievement, Family economic stress, Harsh parenting, Material hardship, Mental health