Beyond provisions: the relationship between poverty status and parenting among single mothers

Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1997 (NLSY-97), this research provides a descriptive portrait of the relationship between poverty and parenting among single mothers of adolescent children. This research contributes to our understanding of how strongly and consistently poverty status relates to various parenting dimensions, including parenting style, monitoring, relationship quality, and limit-setting. This study extends prior work by focusing on within group variation of parenting of single-mother family structures, and including non-poor single mothers in the analyses. Using multinomial logistic and OLS regression, results indicate poverty status is unrelated to the style, relationship quality, and monitoring of single mothers, but it is moderately related to greater involvement in limit-setting. Overall, the experience of poverty does not appear negatively related to the parenting of single mothers. These results indicate poor single mothers appear to manage their parental strategies equally well compared to non-poor single mothers. doi: 10.1300/J002v42n04_04 KEYWORDS. Parenting, poverty, single mothers