Chaos, poverty, and parenting: Predictors of early language development☆
Graphical abstract
Highlights
► Examined 10 markers of family chaos in representative sample of rural toddlers. ► Factor analysis identified household disorganization and household instability. ► Only household disorganization predicted language development at three years.
Section snippets
Chaos and rural low-wealth communities
Over the last 30 years, there have been dramatic changes in the lives of families who live in rural low-wealth communities. For instance, jobs are no longer strongly linked to farming but have moved to the service sector where there are more irregular and non-standard work hours as well as lower wages (Lichter & Jensen, 2002). These jobs are generally not close to where the families live so many parents must commute long distances to work and childcare. There has also been outmigration of young
Sample and design
The Family Life Project (FLP) was designed to study young children and their families who lived in two of the four major geographical areas of the United States with high poverty rates (Dill & Myers, 2008). Specifically, three counties in Eastern North Carolina and three counties in Central Pennsylvania were selected to be indicative of the Black South and Appalachia, respectively. The FLP adopted a developmental epidemiological design in which sampling procedures were employed to recruit a
Analytic strategy
Analyses proceeded in three phases. First, the structure of the 10 indicators of cumulative (over the first three years of the study children's lives) chaos was examined using a combination of principle components (PCA) and exploratory factor analyses (EFA). Second, a series of regression models were estimated to test whether dimensions of household chaos made unique contributions to the prediction of two language outcomes (expressive and receptive language) that were measured when children
Discussion
The initial finding in this study was that our 10 chaos indicators could be represented by two major factors: instability and disorganization. These two factors have recently been highlighted as the key constructs that define household chaos (Evans and Wachs, 2010, Sameroff, 2010). Instability included changes in caregivers, moving households, and changes in people in the household over time, while disorganization included household density, household preparation for home visits, messiness of
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Cited by (0)
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This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (PO1-HD-39667), Lynne-Vernon Feagans and Martha Cox, PIs, with co-funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Center for Minority Health. We also want to thank all the families and children who participated in this longitudinal study.
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The Family Life Project Key Investigators include Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Martha Cox, Clancy Blair, Peg Burchinal, Linda Burton, Keith Crnic, Nan Crouter, Patricia Garrett-Peters, Doug Granger, Mark Greenberg, Stephanie Lanza, Adele Miccio, Roger Mills-Koonce, Deborah Skinner, Cynthia Stifter, Emily Werner, and Mike Willoughby.