Exploring Trajectories of Young Mothers’ Parenting Stress in Early Childhood: Associations with Protective Factors and Psychological Vulnerabilities

SYNOPSIS

Objective. Most parents manage some degree of parenting stress without serious concerns, but young mothers experience parenting stress at higher levels than adult mothers; high parenting stress is problematic due to its association with children’s socioemotional and behavior problems and the increased likelihood of maltreatment. Understanding the circumstances that precipitate or mitigate parents’ stress can have lasting impacts for child well-being. Extant research fails to account for both longitudinal and individual variation in young mothers’ parenting stress, leading to equivocal findings about the nature of mothers’ parenting stress trajectories across early childhood. Design. The present study used growth mixture modeling (GMM) to model the trajectories of 544 first-time young mothers’ parenting stress from children’s infancy to school-age. We considered how protective factors (i.e., social support) and psychological vulnerabilities (i.e., depression) experienced during the transition to parenthood were associated with parenting stress trajectories and variation within trajectories when children were of school-age. Results. GMM identified three trajectories of parenting stress: “low stable”, “high increasing”, and “high decreasing.” Protective factors were related to low and decreasing patterns of parenting stress, whereas psychological vulnerabilities were associated with higher parenting stress patterns. Conclusions. This study has implications for programs and services that help young mothers cope with the demands of parenting and reduce parenting stress.

ADDRESSES AND AFFILIATIONS

Meera Menon, Tufts Interdisciplinary Evaluation Research (TIER), 574 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155, 617-391-2700, Email: [email protected]. Rebecca C. Fauth and M. Ann Easterbrooks are also at Tufts University.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of interest disclosures

Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical principles

The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Role of the funders/sponsors

None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank our colleagues and students at TIER, and the families in our study for sharing their lives with us. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ funders is not intended and should not be inferred.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Children’s Trust of Massachusetts [MA5014] and Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), which is the state administrator of the Massachusetts Home Visiting Initiative (MHVI). This work was supported by Grant X10MC29474 Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Grant Program, from Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).