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Childhood Adversity and Children’s Academic Functioning: Roles of Parenting Stress and Neighborhood Support

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Abstract

Existing research has shown that adverse childhood experiences from family instability and lack of safety increase children’s risk for poor academic functioning. A recent conceptual framework, however, has emphasized the need to investigate how parenting might mediate while community context might moderate the association between childhood adversity and children’s cognitive development. In the current study, we tested the roles of parenting stress and neighborhood support in the association between cumulative childhood adversity and children’s current academic functioning. We conducted a secondary data analysis on the subsample of school-aged children (i.e., 6–17 years old; N = 65,680) from the 2011–2012 United States National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH). The parent provided telephone survey data on six types of adversity (e.g., parent’s divorce) that the target child experienced, parenting stress, neighborhood support, as well as the child’s academic functioning. Controlling for the child’s age, gender, ethnicity, and the parent’s education level, structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed a significant moderated mediating effect: parenting stress partially mediated the association between history of childhood adversity and children’s current academic functioning (β = −1.760, p < 0.001), while neighborhood support moderated the association between parenting stress (β = 0.492, p < 0.001) and academic functioning.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the staff of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative’s Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for provision of cleaned and coded datasets, codebooks and technical assistance in the conceptualization and construction of analytic variables and data analysis.

Author Contributions

T.X.T.: Conceptualized, wrote and revised the manuscript. Y.W.: Conducted data analysis and collaborated in writing and revising the manuscript. A.R.: Assisted in writing and editing the final manuscript.

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  1. Department of Educational and Psychological Studies, College of Education, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL, 33620, USA

    Tony Xing Tan & Yan Wang

  2. University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg, FL, USA

    Adryona D. Ruggerio

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Tan, T.X., Wang, Y. & Ruggerio, A. Childhood Adversity and Children’s Academic Functioning: Roles of Parenting Stress and Neighborhood Support. J Child Fam Stud 26, 2742–2752 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0775-8

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