Living in dangerous neighborhoods: The effects on poor, African-American single mothers and their children.

Abstract

This dissertation investigated how families are affected by residing in dangerous, poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Specifically, the study explores the impact of neighborhood characteristics on the parenting behavior of single, African American mothers and on the academic values and socioemotional functioning of their adolescent children. Interview data from a sample of 262 poor, African American, single mothers and their seventh and eighth grade children was utilized. Assessments of neighborhood quality consisted of both subjective and objective measures. The objective neighborhood measures included police crime statistics and U.S. census data. In the first model, greater receipt of social support predicted higher levels of maternal nurturance and this positive relation between social support and nurturance was moderated by neighborhood conditions, for mothers of adolescent boys. As neighborhood conditions worsened, receipt of instrumental social support was no longer as strongly related to mothers' nurturant parenting. This finding was bolstered by its presence with four different indicators of neighborhood quality: mothers' subjective assessments of the neighborhood, rates of violent crime, neighborhood poverty rates, and percentage of female headed households in the neighborhood. More demonstrations of nurturant parenting were, in turn, related to healthy socioemotional functioning among adolescent males. An effect of neighborhood conditions on African American adolescents' educational values emerged in the second model after controlling for a host of family and school-related constructs. For African American female adolescents, those who resided in neighborhoods with lower median household incomes tended to view education as less important and less useful. Conversely, for adolescent males, neighborhood characteristics did not predict educational values. Additionally, twenty mothers participated in follow-up, qualitative interviews that further illuminated the quantitative results and provided detailed examples of how community violence strains family life. From these interviews, four strategies used by mothers to cope with pressing environmental dangers were identified: (1) withdrawal from the neighborhood, (2) vigilant parenting, (3) establishment of "open" relationships with their children, and (4) reliance on religious faith or beliefs.