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ENTRY CHARACTERISTICS OF RURAL FAMILIES WITH YOUNG CHILDREN: ASSESSMENT OF RISK AND RESILIENCE
Catherine Ayoub, Barbara Alexander Pan, and
Valeria Rocha
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Systematic assessment of child, parent, and family at the time of eligibility for services is one way to begin to identify service needs. The Harvard Graduate School of Education research team explored characteristics of the child, parent, and family in the context of parenting stressors, family strengths and problems, child-rearing attitudes and practices, parental emotional health, and family functioning. The research sample consisted of 133 families eligible for Early Head Start services in Windham County, Vermont. All the primary caregivers were mothers.
The rural families in this sample are exposed to many of the risks that urban families experience; those risks are often compounded by the isolation and poverty of rural living. More than half the families, like many of their urban counterparts, consist of single female heads of household. Most mothers were between 20 and 29 years old at entry to the study; the youngest was 17 years old and the oldest 41. The majority of mothers had just given birth to their first child. In contrast to families in urban settings, nearly all families in this sample are white native English speakers. In spite of this fairly uniform demographic picture, however, wide variation in risk and protective factors was observed, illustrating just how much the families differ in their intervention needs. To examine families' risk and resilience at baseline, information about parenting stress, parenting values and beliefs, emotional health, and interpersonal relationships was collected when families entered the study.
Parenting stress was measured by the Parenting Stress Index (PSI), a well-validated instrument used to evaluate stressors in both the parent and child domains (Abidin 1995). Parents were considered to be at high levels of stress based on clinically validated cutoff values (85th percentile and above) established by the author. Mothers in the Vermont sample found parenting more stressful than the average parent in the general population. More than a fourth (28 percent) experienced high levels of parenting stress. However, mothers' perceptions of parenting stress varied, from no experienced stress in the role (scoring at the 7th percentile) to cases in which stress was experienced in almost every domain of parenting (scores at the 98th percentile). Sources of parenting tension as measured by the PSI included a focus on the child as difficult (28 percent), on the mother's feelings of lack of competence as a parent (22 percent), on mother's poor health status (15 percent), and on lack of social support (21 percent). The most common source of parenting stress for these mothers (43 percent) was their child's inability to adapt to change. Mothers reported difficulties with their child's distractibility and hyperactivity (26 percent), demandingness (26 percent), acceptability (43 percent), and negative mood (11 percent). One-fifth (20 percent) of mothers in the sample felt that their child did not reinforce their competence as a parent.
A further assessment focused on the mother's role in ensuring her child's safety and care. This assessment was based on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAP), a 120-item measure that provides an indication of the potential for abusive or neglectful parenting, as well as more specific indices of distress, rigidity, unhappiness, problems with child and self, problems with family, and problems with others. The clinical cutoff at the 95th percentile was taken as an indicator of high-risk parenting (Milner 1986). The present sample of mothers varied in describing their parenting values and beliefs, emotional health, and relationships with others. Mothers' predicted potential for acting in a physically abusive way toward their children varied from the 1st to the 99th percentile. More than a fourth (26 percent) of the mothers in the sample expressed potentially abusive values and beliefs about their children. Problems most frequently identified as influencing the potential for negative parenting and child abuse included emotional health indicators of unhappiness (26 percent) and emotional distress (22 percent).
At the same time, a sizable group of women in the sample (88 percent) showed remarkable ego strength. Many mothers saw their relationships with their infants and toddlers as positive (95 percent). One-fifth of the mothers felt that their lives were relatively stress-free in terms of their parenting (PSI 19 percent) and emotional health (CAP 21 percent). For strength-based programs, this kind of information can be central to supporting parents' resilience.
Based on the CAP, mothers' perceptions of problems in their interpersonal relationships were varied. One-fifth of the mothers (20 percent) identified the source of problems within their immediate or extended families, while 19 percent felt that their parenting attitudes and beliefs were seen as problematic only by people and institutions in the larger community. With information on relationship perspectives as a base, targeted intervention planning can be positively supported. Information about a parent's perception of the source of her problems can give the interventionist an entry point for action.
In spite of the geographical, socioeconomic, and ethnic similarities in this group of Vermont mothers, their needs and goals for intervention are quite dissimilar, given the tremendous variation observed in psychosocial risk and protective factors. Programs serving families like these need to be able to assess each family's needs in terms of risks and strengths and develop an intervention plan tailored to their individual needs.
References
Abidin, R. Parenting Stress Index Professional Manual, Third Edition. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources, 1995.
Milner, J. The Child Abuse Potential Inventory:
Manual. Webster, NC: Psytec Corporation, 1986.
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