The early years of my career were devoted to research on children’s play (e.g., McLoyd, 1980) and intrinsic motivation (e.g., McLoyd, 1979) and to analyses of the conceptual and methodological problems that plagued research on African American children’s development (e.g., McLoyd & Randolph, 1984, 1985; Washington & McLoyd, 1982). In the mid-1980s, I turned my attention to understanding economic stress and the family- and neighborhood-level processes through which it affected children’s socioemotional functioning. The 1980–1982 economic recession ravaged the State of Michigan and I found myself pondering a slew of questions in response to the steady drumbeat of stories in the Detroit-Ann Arbor media chronicling how economic stress was upending family life. I was drawn to this area of study partly because living under Jim Crow in Alabama as a child heightened my sensitivity to economic deprivation and instability, and how they could radically impact the quality of life. I grew up in a middle-class family (my mother was a school teacher, my father an African American Episcopal minister), but I knew many hardworking families in our community for whom making ends meet was a constant struggle that took a toll on family life. The feasibility of carrying out a program of research in this area increased when I received a Faculty Scholars Award from the William T. Grant Foundation, a 5-year award that enabled early- and mid-career faculty scholars to reduce their teaching load to devote more time to research specifically focused on stress and coping in school-age children.
I published several highly cited conceptual and review papers and book chapters on childhood poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage that centered on family dynamics and developmental processes (e.g., McLoyd, 1990, 1998a, 1998b; McLoyd, Aikens, & Burton, 2006). In keeping with Bronfenbrenner’s ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1986), I was careful to situate these microsystem-level processes within processes operating at the exosystem and macrosystem level (e.g., historical and contemporary racism, public policy, and practice). In terms of empirical research, my collaborators and I tested variants of the family stress model, drawing on Elder’s work on children of the Great Depression (Elder et al., 1985) and Conger’s studies of White families in rural Iowa hit by the farm crisis in the 1980s (e.g., Conger et al., 1992). Even though both of these lines of research focused on how families coped with the shock of economic loss, I could see their relevance for our work investigating economic stress as an ongoing condition. The family stress model emphasizes the impact that economic stress has on children through its impact on parents’ mental health, marital and co-parenting relationships, and quality of parenting. The model hypothesizes a cascading process whereby (a) insufficient income creates economic pressure as parents struggle to pay bills and meet material needs, and make economic adjustments (e.g., cutbacks, reducing utility costs); (b) economic pressure creates irritability or depressive moods that spill over into marital and co-parenting relationships. These problems, in turn, encourage parenting practices that are more punitive, harsh, and inconsistent and can harm children’s socioemotional development.
My collaborators and I found support for most of the hypothesized links in the model in families from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, in two-parent and single-parent families, and in families living in both rural and urban contexts. Hypothesized relations among variables generally held across gender and age of child (e.g., Conger et al., 2002; Gard et al., 2020; Gutman et al., 2005; Jocson & McLoyd, 2015; McLoyd et al., 1994; McLoyd & Wilson, 1990; Mistry et al., 2002). Although our studies and those conducted by other scholars provided robust empirical support for the family stress model, we emphasized that parenting behavior is only one of multiple pathways through which poverty and economic stress can undermine children’s socioemotional adjustment.
Expanding our focus to include the exosystem, we found that neighborhood problems associated with poverty (e.g., low social control, vandalism, abandoned buildings) can indirectly contribute to internalizing and externalizing behavior in children and adolescents through their influence on mothers’ mental health and parenting behavior (e.g., Gutman, et al., 2005; Jocson & McLoyd, 2015), and that the benefits of emotional and instrumental support on parenting diminish in neighborhoods beset with a higher prevalence of poverty and crime (Ceballo & McLoyd, 2002; McLoyd et al. 1994).
Another strand of work focused on contributors to resilience in low-income children exposed to violence. In general, our findings suggest that exposure to violence may promote youth behavior problems in ways that are not easily overcome by experiences that have robust mitigating influences in the presence of other stressors. In one study, for example, high levels of participation in structured extracurricular activities and positive parent-adolescent relations weakened, but did not eliminate, the link between adolescents’ exposure to community violence and externalizing problems--and furthermore, provided no protection against internalizing problems (Hardaway et al., 2012). In other work, we found that school connectedness protected low-income children against social deprivation (i.e., low levels of support in the home and neighborhood), but had no protective effect against exposure to community or domestic violence (Goetschius et al., 2021).
My opportunity to shift from correlational to experimental research and from basic to policy research (and to investigate directly the influence of factors in the macrosystem) came in the late 1990s when I joined a multidisciplinary team of researchers that evaluated the longitudinal effects on children and their parents of New Hope, a 3-year, employment-based, antipoverty program with random assignment. It was an edifying experience that generated opportunities to advance policies that benefit children and their families. We published numerous papers based on the evaluation (e.g., Huston et al., 2005; McLoyd et al., 2011), but space restrictions require that I forego discussion of the findings. Suffice it to say that New Hope was one of several welfare-to-work experiments conducted during the 1990s that provided wage supplements to individuals in the treatment group, contingent on parents working a minimum number of hours per week/month. A subsequent synthesis of different welfare-to-work experiments showed that only wage supplement programs (compared to programs that provided no wage supplements but had mandatory employment/educational activities or made welfare benefits available for only a limited amount of time) increased both parental employment and family income and consistently produced positive effects across a range of child behaviors.
A National Academy of Sciences Consensus Committee (of which I was a member) charged with identifying evidence-based programs and policies for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the US by half within 10 years reviewed these and other findings from quasi-experiments and natural experiments. On the basis of its review, the committee concluded that “the weight of the causal evidence indicates that income poverty itself causes negative child outcomes, especially when it begins in early childhood and/or persists throughout a large share of a child’s life” (Duncan & Menestrel, 2019, p. 89). This conclusion had critically important implications for policy. As the committee noted, if the associations between poverty and negative child outcomes are caused by factors other than income, the root causes of negative child outcomes must be addressed by policies other than the kinds of income-focused anti-poverty proposals the committee identified. The committee’s report, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, figured prominently in the anti-poverty legislation that President Biden signed into law in 2021 (i.e., American Rescue Plan). The historic, near-universal child allowance, premised on evidence of the causal effects of poverty on children’s development, was the most controversial but impactful of the anti-poverty policies in the law. Regrettably, as we now know, despite dramatically reducing child poverty, the child allowance ended after one year.
I end this essay with heartfelt expressions of gratitude to the many talented, conscientious, and generous graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty colleagues with whom I collaborated throughout my career. They played significant roles in instigating, framing, and bringing to fruition the research projects mentioned in this essay and overall, made the process of doing research infinitely more gratifying. I also thank the many individuals who chipped away at structural racial barriers, opened doors of opportunity, and encouraged, inspired, and challenged me through good times and bad. They planted and cultivated the seeds for the rewarding career that I have enjoyed.
References
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