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theses

Toddlerhood is a critical transitional stage of social-emotional development in early childhood. Toddlers who lack healthy social-emotional development may have difficulty transitioning into kindergarten. In contrast, toddlers with strong social-emotional development can control their tempers and behaviors better, relate better with others, and perform better academically. Researchers have found that maternal instrumental social support is essential for ensuring quality care and improving child development. Unfortunately, though, the instrumental social support that the mother and family obtain, especially after pregnancy and before toddlerhood, may substantially marginalize the toddlers' social and emotional development.Moreover, although social support is an essential resource for mitigating challenges, it is not well understood that parents of immigrant families are not equipped to navigate the system. Immigrant families, particularly those with low income, experience more significant economic hardship and resettlement stressors than native-born families. The process of acculturation and social homophily, or characteristics of immigrant groups’ social networks, also differs. Therefore, one motivation of this study was to understand the perception of instrumental social support among mothers from immigrant families, the association between perceived support and parenting stress, and the link between maternal perceived social support and child well-being, considering the effect of socioeconomic status. In addition, though many studies have discussed the effect of instrumental social support on maternal mental health, perceived and received instrumental support have never been simultaneously investigated due to their complexity. Most literature has found a significant effect of perceived instrumental social support on mental health, parenting stress, or distress. However, extant studies have not examined the effect of receiving instrumental social support. Hence, the current study examined how both perceived and received instrumental social support are associated with toddlers’ social-emotional development.
This study conducted a secondary analysis using data from the Fragile Families & Child Wellbeing Study, a national longitudinal panel study of 5,000 births across 20 U.S. cities with a population of 200,000 or more. Due to the reduction of the sample by 2/3, the use of weighting was not going to work (Watson, 2014). Instead, I used multiple imputation procedures to impute the missing values (Honaker et al., 2011). To investigate the effect of maternal perceived instrumental social support and received instrumental social support on toddlers’ social-emotional development and estimate the mediation effect of parenting stress, I conducted a cross-sectional mediation model based on Barron and Kenny’s (1986) and Hayes and Preacher’s (2014) approach to examine the mediated effect of maternal parenting stress on the relationships between maternal perceived instrumental social support and received instrumental social support and toddler outcomes. Additionally, I conducted a conditional mediation analysis to examine the moderated effect of immigrant status.
The overall findings suggested that perceived instrumental social support had, directly and indirectly, a positive association with toddlers’ social-emotional development by decreasing parenting stress. Received instrumental social support was indirectly associated with lower toddlers’ social-emotional development by increasing the level of parenting stress. The findings supported the Family Investment Model's argument that people with more financial and social capital might benefit their children’s development. The findings also supported the Family Stress Model perspective, which posits that stressors might harm child development. This study found that maternal parenting stress can significantly harm toddlers. Last, this study pointed out that when mothers stay on the receiving end of the support, they may develop higher parenting stress, in turn causing harm to childhood development. Building relationships of trust is more important than simply providing assistance and support to parents.

http://dissertations.umi.com/gsnb.rutgers:12267

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-96tz-cq55

The author owns the copyright to this work.