Managing to Parent: Social Support, Social Capital, and Parenting Practices among Welfare-Participating Mothers with Young Children

This study investigated relationships among mothers’ social support, individual attributes, social capital, and parenting practices for welfare-participating mothers with young children. Using data from the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies, latent profile analysis revealed three classes of mothers, reflecting high, moderate, and low patterns of social support. Overall, low support class members were quite broadly disadvantaged relative to the other groups, while moderate support class members were primarily disadvantaged in terms of neighborhood. Relationships between social support and social capital were highly nuanced, with strong social support acting as a “buffer” against the effects of mothers’ stress on controlling discipline, but moderately constrained social support protecting against the negative effects of a welfare-based peer group on maternal warmth. Managing to Parent: Social Support, Social Capital, and Parenting Practices among Welfare-Participating Mothers with Young Children All parents manage a variety of resources—knowledge, experience, and skills, as well as material goods and neighborhood or community resources—in the day-to-day processes and practices of parenting. Affluent parents with access to desirable resources can manage parenting in ways that go well beyond meeting basic needs, resulting in value added to their children’s potential. For poor parents with fewer material resources, managing to parent can be a struggle to ensure safety, to provide for basic needs, and to create spaces and opportunities in which their children are not constrained from realizing their potential. Scholarship focusing on social networks and parenting indicates that social relationships can aid parents in coping with the stresses and demands of child rearing, particularly in the context of family poverty (Belle, 1983; Benin and Keith, 1995; Ceballo and McLoyd, 2002; Garbarino, 1987; Hashima and Yamato, 1994; Webster-Stratton, 1997; Weinraub and Wolf, 1983; Zigler, 1994). Along these lines, literatures on social support and social capital each present evidence that social ties are important for understanding family processes, the former emphasizing interpersonal aspects of relationship, and the latter highlighting the structural aspects of “social positions” which facilitate relationships between individuals who are similar in terms of wealth, income, education, and cultural characteristics (Lin, 2000; Bourdieu, 1986). Social capital theory emphasizes that the value of social networks is a product of social structures, thus making a critical connection between person-level dynamics and the broader societal arrangements which generate and sustain inequality, securing disadvantage on particular people and communities. There is a need, however, for more attention to the ways that individuals actually encounter, access, and are affected by these societal arrangements within their daily lives. A rich social support literature, which tends to neighborhood context as well as to interpersonal skills, suggests that the effect of social support on individual behaviors is shaped by where one lives, and the attitudes, norms, behaviors and resources of one’s neighbors. This literature provides