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Parenting

How can parents successfully care for their children in the context of homelessness? This is a significant question because families with children represent approximately 40 percent of the homeless population in the United States, and the number of homeless children has been growing since the early 1980s. Negative consequences of homelessness to children's health, education, and emotional and social development have been well documented. Homeless families in the United States can be considered a subset of limited-resource families, and as such they share some of the same challenges to effective parenting. However, homeless parents face additional challenges, and these challenges have two distinct origins: First, homeless parents as a population have significantly higher levels of several risk factors that can compromise parenting, regardless of current housing status; and second, being homeless poses threats to parenting beyond those experienced by housed families in poverty.

Parenting Functions and Qualities

Functions of parenting include (1) providing basic necessities for children's health and survival; (2) preparing children for self-sufficiency at maturity, which includes both formal and informal education; (3) socializing children consistent with culturally accepted values and behavioral norms; and (4) caring for children's emotional and social needs. Research has documented qualities of parenting behavior that are associated with such positive development for children. For example, when parents are warm and supportive but also provide consistent guidance and clear expectations, their children are more socially and cognitively competent—that is, they are more likely to be helpful and empathic with their peers, to be accepted and liked by their peers, to cooperate with teachers and other adults, to progress well in school, and to be self-reliant. Children whose parents are harsh, detached, or overly permissive fare less well on these developmental tasks than their peers.

Influences on parenting qualities have also been well documented. Parents who have good social support are more likely to be warm, responsive, and cognitively stimulating with their children. Parents who are more highly educated provide more verbal and cognitive stimulation for their children. Conversely, stressors such as marital dissatisfaction, financial stress, and depression predict higher levels of irritable parenting and less warmth, responsiveness, and verbal or cognitive stimulation. Homeless parents have fewer resources to support their parenting and experience more stressors that can disrupt their parenting than do housed parents living in poverty.

Parenting in Poverty

By definition, families in poverty lack the economic resources necessary to meet demands. Thus, parents are forced to make difficult choices on a daily basis—for example, to spend money to do laundry, buy food, or pay for transportation. To make matters worse, families in poverty are also “time poor”—that is, they spend more time meeting basic needs than middle-income families and therefore have less time and energy to devote to their children. Moreover, parents who live in poverty experience more “daily hassles” such as negotiating with utility companies about payments and disconnection than do those in middle-income families, and accumulation of hassles causes negative emotional states such as depression and anxiety. Parents who are preoccupied with meeting survival needs and with managing daily hassles are less able to be warm and supportive, to provide consistent limits and expectations, or to provide cognitive and verbal stimulation to their children. The majority of families in poverty are “working poor,” and employers of such low-wage workers tend to be less flexible about parents taking time off work to participate in school activities or take a sick child to the doctor, for example. This lack of flexibility adds to the demands and difficulties that compromise optimal parenting.

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