Parenting, Stressful Environments and

The focus of this entry is on parenting in socially impoverished settings that hold diverse psychosocial stressors for parents, pose challenges to the parent-child relationship, and act as risk factors in children's healthy development. A developmental systems approach to understanding human behavior and development in general, and to parenting more specifically, considers multiple levels of organization that comprise individuals' lives, as well as the integrative functions of these [Page 804]levels and the bidirectional interactions that exist between them. These multiple levels of organization represent each individual's ecology (e.g., parents, peer groups, and culture), provide micro- and macro-processes of support for the individual, and have the ability to change independently with time (Bronfenbrenner, 1999; Lerner, 2002). The interactions that occur within different levels of one's ecology and between these levels and the individual reflect embeddedness of the individual in his or her context. In regard to parenting, the very presence of the individual's embeddedness in the context tells us that to understand parenting, we must take into consideration not only the child and his or her parents but also the wider context that surrounds them and the dynamic interactions, and outcomes of those interactions, that exist between the child and the parent in the light of their daily settings.

In the study of parenting in stressful environments, the focus can be either on the environments in which socioeconomic stressors represent an acute occurrence (e.g., war, parental illness, homelessness, etc.) or on the environments in which stressors have formed and remained long enough to be considered chronic stressors. It is important to note that acute social stressors can bring about social changes that, in time, may turn into more or less intense chronic social outcomes. For example, families living in communities ridden by war tend to experience at first acute stressors (e.g., unemployment, fear for physical safety, and inadequate nutrition), which eventually develop into chronic social issues (e.g., poverty and violence) and turn communities into impoverished settings for both parents and children. Our focus in this discussion of relations between parenting in stressful environments and its impact on children's healthy development is on acutely impoverished settings, also referred to as “toxic environments” (Garbarino, Kostelny, & Barry, 1997).