Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-11-2021

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Abstract

Experiencing poverty increases vulnerability for dysregulated hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis functioning and compromises long-term health. Positive parenting buffers children from HPA axis reactivity, yet this has primarily been documented among families not experiencing poverty. We tested the theorized power of positive parenting in 124 parent–child dyads recruited from Early Head Start (Mage = 25.21 months) by examining child cortisol trajectories using five samples collected across a standardized stress paradigm. Piecewise latent growth models revealed that positive parenting buffered children's stress responses when controlling for time of day, last stress task completed, and demographics. Positive parenting also interacted with income such that positive parenting was especially protective for cortisol reactivity in families experiencing greater poverty. Findings suggest that positive parenting behaviors are important for protecting children in families experiencing low income from heightened or prolonged physiologic stress reactivity to an acute stressor.

Copyright Statement/License for Reuse

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Statement

This article was originally published by Cambridge University Press as:

Brown, S. M., Schlueter, L. J., Hurwich-Reiss, E., Dmitrieva, J., Miles, E., & Watamura, S. E. (2021). Parental buffering in the context of poverty: positive parenting behaviors differentiate young children's stress reactivity profiles. Development and Psychopathology 32(Special Issue 5), 1778-1787. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579420001224

Copyright is held by the authors. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Download

Share

COinS