Ethnic Variation in Poverty and Parenting Stress

Given poverty rates in the USA, and that 33% of the nation’s poor are children (Jiang, Ekono, & Skinner, 2015), poor families are hardly on the fringes. Santiago Barquín’s words speak to the indiscriminate nature of poverty—it does not differentiate between color or creed when venting its fury. Living in poverty affects not only the individual, but also every domain associated with the individual’s life. An important question that has received limited research attention is how poverty affects parenting stress. We extend this question by including racial and ethnic minority groups who are disproportionately affected by poverty in the USA. Together, our chapter focuses on poverty and parenting stress in families from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds. Our discussion begins with a review of the Family Stress Model (FSM) of economic disadvantage, which is the main framework used for understanding the relationship between poverty and parenting behaviors. The bulk of the chapter is situated in the poverty and parenting literature, paying special attention to factors salient to racial and ethnic families, such as the