Parental debt and children’s socioemotional wellbeing

1. Context
2. The study
3. Key findings
4. Points to consider

• Context
• The study
• Key findings
• Points to consider
• Full report

Context

There is a wealth of evidence that highlights a strong association between children’s socioemotional wellbeing and familial socioeconomic resources. Limited access to economic resources is associated with stress and harsher parenting practices, as well as poorer physical and social environments, parental mental health and parent-child relationships, which can impact negatively on a child’s socioemotional development. While research has explored these areas extensively, there was no known research examining the links between parental debt and child socioemotional wellbeing. This study aims to fill the gap in knowledge.

The study

Dr Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr Houle of Dartmouth College conducted this study. The study aimed to explore the link between parental debt and child socioemotional well-being, examining the role of different types of debt, such as mortgage, education, automobile and unsecured debt.

The authors conducted a quantitative secondary data analysis. The study draws on population-based longitudinal data on children and their mothers from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (1979 cohort) and Children of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. The final analytic sample comprised of 29,318 year-on-year observations of 9,011 children (aged 5 to 14) of mothers.

Key findings

• The study found that there is a positive association between total debt and child behaviour problems, but this association is driven largely by unsecured debt, rather than other debt types, such as mortgage or education debts.
• However, the data did not allow the researchers to explore whether the strength of association differs across types of unsecured debt, and the authors suggest that future research should explore this further.
• Higher levels of home mortgage and education debt were associated with greater levels of socioemotional wellbeing for children, although this finding was only significant when time-varying characteristics or child-specific fixed effects were not included. This suggests that the association reflects differences in child socioemotional wellbeing between homeowner and non-homeowner families, rather than the actual effect of home debt alone.

Points to consider

• Methodological limitations:
  • The two data-sets that were analysed did not break down unsecured debt by type. As access to credit varies by socioeconomic status, the authors stated they would have ideally divided the unsecured debt into different categories (such as medical debt, payday loan debt and credit card debt) to understand whether different types of unsecured debt would be associated differently with child socioemotional wellbeing.
• Relevance:
  • This study is relevant for paediatricians and policymakers. It highlights that paediatricians should be concerned about the socioemotional development of children whose parents have unsecured debt.
• Generalisability/transferability:
  • As the child socioemotional wellbeing measure was administered only to mothers of children aged 5 to 14, the sample was limited only to children in this age range. Therefore, the findings cannot be generalised to children who are either older or younger than this.

Full report

Parental debt and children’s socioemotional wellbeing - full report