Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The magnitude of the recent Great Recession precipitated increased interest in how economic downturns impact children. However, while economic hardship has both objective and subjective dimensions, research on the effects of economic downturns on children has primarily examined the impacts of objective economic hardship on families. Emerging evidence reporting that effects of economic downturns are not limited to families who experience objective economic distress suggests that this narrow focus on objective hardship provides an incomplete picture of the effects of economic downturns.

Since the subjective experience of economic distress negatively impacts family functioning it is possible that economic downturns also affect children through increases in subjective economic hardship. This paper investigates this possibility by estimating the relationship between the objective and subjective hardships associated with economic downturns, harsh parenting, and children’s social-emotional development. Because welfare policies may buffer families from this downturn-related economic hardship, this paper also assesses how these associations differ across policy contexts.

 Data and Methods

This study combines local unemployment data with the Parenting Across Cultures (PAC) longitudinal survey data on parenting and the development of school-aged children from Colombia, Jordan, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States. The PAC data were collected between 2008 and 2013 (total n = 874 families). The data include several measures of children’s social-emotional development and parenting behaviors, specifically disciplinary behavior, and warm, hostile, and neglectful parenting. The PAC data also include measures of family-level objective economic hardship (i.e. family income and job loss) and subjective economic hardship (i.e. perceived ability to pay for basic needs). Data on local quarterly unemployment rates obtained from each country’s statistical agency is used to capture community-level economic conditions. The PAC sample mean of objective hardship within each site provides an additional measure of community-level economic conditions.

Because of PAC’s nested data structure, multilevel regression models are used to assess the moderating effect of community-level economic conditions on the relation between parenting styles and behavior and children’s social-emotional development. Additional analyses will be conducted to identify whether this moderating effect varies with the generosity and accessibility of a country’s welfare state policy.

 Preliminary Analysis

Among PAC families, 22.1% experienced objective economic hardship and 34.9% experienced subjective economic hardship during at least one data collection wave. Initial analyses using Wave 2 data show that subjective economic hardship is consistently associated with problematic parenting behavior, while objective economic hardship is only associated with problematic parenting behavior when accompanied with subjective hardship. In fact, parents who report subjective hardship but no objective hardship are more likely to spank, slap, or hit their child than parents who report only objective economic hardship (c² (4, n = 510) = 22.02, p=0.00). Furthermore, parents who report only objective hardship are no more likely to use physical punishment than parents who report no hardship (c² (4, n = 421) = 7.50, p=0.12). Additional analyses will identify the impact of objective and subjective economic hardship during economic downturns on parenting and children’s social-emotional outcomes within the different welfare policy contexts in these six countries.