Making Meaning From Money: Subjective Social Status and Young Children’s Behavior Problems

While early exposure to poverty has been linked to decrements in children’s behavior through underlying pathways of parenting stress and depression, extant research has typically relied on the use of objective measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to test these associations. However, children’s development may be shaped by the ways that parents perceive social class, which may operate independently and differentially from objective SES. Using structural equation modeling, the present study explores relationships between parents’ ratings of subjective social status (SSS), objective indicators of SES (income-to-needs ratio, education, employment status), and young children’s (ages 0 –3) behavior problems among 173 low-income families living in an urban area in the northeast United States. In addition, we consider whether parents’ stress and depression underlie these associations. Results demonstrate negative relationships from both objective SES and SSS to parents’ well-being. Moreover, in keeping with the Family Stress Model, we find that both SES and SSS are related to children’s adjustment via parents’ stress and depression; parents who have lower levels of education, are not employed, and who report lower SSS also report higher levels of stress, which in turn is related to higher levels of children’s behavior problems. To our knowledge, this is the first study to test assumptions of the Family Stress Model using both subjective and objective indicators of social status, and one of few studies exploring linkages between parents’ perceptions of SSS and children’s behavior problems.