ABSTRACT
Parenting differs across socioeconomic strata. Our primary goals in this chapter are to describe how and why this is so. We begin the chapter by reviewing the history of research on socioeconomic status (SES) and parenting, including the political and the scientific trends that have shaped that research. We follow with a discussion of definitional and methodological issues that complicate conducting and synthesizing research in this area. We then turn to the literature that describes the relations between SES and parenting, reviewing evidence that the goals parents have for their children, the nature of the emotional relationship parents establish with their children, and the particular practices parents use in rearing their children all vary as a function of SES. As we move through the literature on differences in parenting that are associated with SES, we describe potential sources of those differences. One concern is to distinguish influences on parenting that derive from external factors associated with SES from influences on parenting that derive from characteristics of individuals that differ according to SES. Another concern is to identify, from the cluster of interrelated variables that SES comprises, the specific factors that cause or contribute to particular differences in parenting. To foreshadow our conclusion, the evidence suggests that both external and internal factors influence parenting and that multiple causal variables work, separately and in concert, to effect SES-related differences in parenting. Parents from different socioeconomic strata rear their children differently partly in response to the different circumstances in which they live and partly because they are themselves different sorts of people with different ways of interacting with the world. Educational, occupational, and financial factors all work to create SES-related differences in parents’ circumstances and characteristics, with educational factors appearing to carry the greatest share of the variance. Finally, we consider some of the interpretive issues and limitations of the current literature, and how, given both its findings and its limitations, the literature on SES and parenting might be applied to improving child welfare.
