Parenting and child psychosocial adjustment in single-parent African American families: Is community context important?

This study addressed two questions about single-parent African American families: Are parenting strategies associated with perceived risks in the environmental context? and Does the association between parenting and child adjustment depend on the context in which parenting occurs? Families (N = 277) resided in 2 communities that differed in violence-related risk: one rural (low risk) and one urban (high risk). Mother-reported monitoring and warm, supportive mother-child relationships and child-reported internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and social competence were examined. Mothers monitored their children more in the urban than the rural community. The warmth and supportive nature of the mother-child relationship did not differ across contexts. A warm, supportive mother-child relationship was associated with fewer internalizing and externalizing child behaviors in both contexts. Monitoring was associated with fewer problem behaviors only in the urban community.