The Relation Between Emotional Availability and Parenting Style: Cultural and Economic Factors in a Diverse Sample of Young Mothers

SYNOPSIS

Objective. The goals of this study were to examine emotional availability, parenting attitudes, and parenting behaviors in relation to parenting style and cultural context in a diverse group of young mothers. Design. Participants were 313 first-time adolescent mothers of toddler-aged children from European American, Latin American, and African American backgrounds. Emotional availability was assessed using the Emotional Availability Scales, and cluster analysis was used to examine relations with mothers' reports of parenting attitudes and behaviors. Results. Three parenting styles emerged from the data: democratic, strict loving, and directive. The democratic and directive parenting styles were related to maternal ethnicity; European American mothers were more highly represented in the democratic parenting group, and Latin American mothers were more highly represented in the directive parenting group. In multivariate regression analysis, maternal Sensitivity was predicted by socioeconomic indicators but not ethnicity. Cultural background predicted style of parenting; socioeconomic markers predicted Sensitivity. Conclusions. Results are situated within current research about adolescent parenting, cultural context, and the strong confound between ethnicity and income within the United States.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the Massachusetts Children's Trust Fund. The authors would like to thank the families who participated in the research. We acknowledge also the support provided by Jayanthi Mistry, Francine Jacobs, and the research staff of the Massachusetts Healthy Families Evaluation.

Notes

¹Result for comparisons of ethnicity across the five-group categorization could not be interpreted due to small cell sizes.