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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2022 Jan 24.
Published in final edited form as: Child Dev. 1999 Sep-Oct;70(5):1197–1208. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00087

Linking Maternal Efficacy Beliefs, Developmental Goals, Parenting Practices, and Child Competence in Rural Single-Parent African American Families

Gene H Brody 1, Douglas L Flor 2, Nicole Morgan Gibson 3
PMCID: PMC8786439  NIHMSID: NIHMS1714639  PMID: 10546340

Abstract

With a sample of 139 rural, single-parent African American families with a 6- to 9-year-old child, we traced the links among family financial resource adequacy, maternal childrearing efficacy beliefs, developmental goals, parenting practices, and children’s academic and psychosocial competence. A multimethod, multiinformant design was used to assess the constructs of interest. Consistent with the hypothesized paths, financial resource adequacy was linked with mothers’ sense of childrearing efficacy. Efficacy beliefs were linked with parenting practices indirectly through developmental goals. Competence-promoting parenting practices were indirectly linked with children’s academic and psychosocial competence through their association with children’s self-regulation.

INTRODUCTION

Poverty is the greatest problem facing single African American mothers and their children (Edelman, 1985; Rodgers, 1987; Smith & Smith, 1986), particularly for those families living in the rural South. Fifty percent of single African American mothers living in the rural South live at or below the poverty line (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990). Researchers have suggested that the demands of raising a family in poverty may differ for rural and urban mothers. McLaughlin and Sachs (1988) identified a lack of employment opportunities, fewer child care resources, and income lower than that commonly available in urban areas as particular difficulties with which rural single mothers must cope. The rural poor have access to fewer services and amenities than do the urban poor (Orthner, 1986), and rural African Americans must cope with what Tickamyer and Duncan (1990) have termed “an oppressive social structure.”

In this study we present data from a sample of African American 6- to 9-year-old children from single-mother-headed families living in the rural South, most of whom are living in poverty. Little is known about the social-contextual factors that promote competence among these children, because systematic developmental analyses concerning this population are rare. We examined the mediational roles that maternal efficacy beliefs, developmental goals, and parenting practices play in linking economic stress to children’s academic competence and psychosocial adjustment. Children in the targeted age group were chosen for study because this developmental period is one in which the outcomes we wished to evaluate are prominent. During middle childhood, children must build a sense of competence that will sustain them during the multiple transitions that come with adolescence. They increasingly gain control over their behavior, and their self-concepts become more differentiated and more stable (Harter, 1983; Stipek & Maclver, 1989).

Background

The present study is part of a research program that involved two samples of African American families living in rural Georgia. The first included two-parent families with school-age children in which socioeconomic status ranged from poverty level to upper-middle class. This research focused on the factors that promoted or detracted from interparental relationship quality, which we hypothesized would affect the parents’ ability to cooperate in rearing their children. We examined the associations among family income, parents’ personal functioning, the coparental relationship, and children’s academic and psychosocial outcomes (Brody, Stoneman, & Flor, 1995, 1996a, 1996b; Brody, Stoneman, Flor, & McCrary, 1994; Brody, Stoneman, Flor, McCrary, Hastings, & Conyers, 1994). The results revealed that greater financial resources were associated with less depression and more optimism among the parents. Depression and optimism were associated with each parent’s provision to the other of instrumental and emotional childrearing support, and families who were involved in the rural African American church were more likely to experience supportive coparenting relationships. These coparenting variables were associated with greater self-regulation among the children, which in turn was associated with better performance in reading and mathematics and fewer problems with externalizing and internalizing behaviors.

These results were used to inform the conceptualization and procedures for research involving the second sample of families, from which the data reported in the current article are drawn. This sample was comprised of rural African American single-mother-headed families, over 80% of whom lived at or below the poverty line at the time the data were collected in 1993 and 1994. These families lived in small towns and communities in Georgia, in which poverty rates are among the highest in the United States. Families in these areas often are faced with conditions similar to those in poor inner-city neighborhoods, including high crime rates and a large proportion of single-parent households (O’Hare & Curry-White, 1992). Combined with the chronic economic stress that many of these families face, these conditions can take a toll on the mothers and their children. The primary aim of this research program has been to describe the processes through which family economic hardship is linked with academic and psychosocial competence among rural African American school-age children living in single-parent households.

Thus far in our work with this sample, we have described the ways in which maternal resources such as educational attainment, financial resources, self-esteem, and religiosity are linked with home management and parenting behaviors that were hypothesized to promote children’s academic and psychosocial competence. Family financial resources, mothers’ educational attainment, and participation in rural African American churches were associated with predictable home environments and affectively positive mother-child relationships. These variables in turn were associated with academic and psychosocial competence (Brody & Flor, 1997, 1998). These findings are consistent with those from several other studies that document indirect links, through proximal family processes, from economic hardship and parental personal resources (such as educational attainment) to children’s developmental outcomes (Baldwin, Baldwin, Sameroff, & Seifer, 1989; Conger et al, 1992; Elder, 1995).

Our research is guided by a conceptual model, presented in Figure 1, that links financial stress, parenting efficacy, developmental goals, and competence-promoting parenting practices to children’s academic and psychosocial functioning. The first link in the model concerns the association between family financial stress and mothers’ beliefs about their efficacy as parents. Chronic financial stresses can sap parents’ confidence, convincing them that they cannot influence or control aspects of their lives that they value. This sense of helplessness and demoralization has been shown to spill over into the childrearing realm, undermining their beliefs that they can exercise influence over their children’s development (Mirowsky & Ross, 1989). For example, Luster and Kain (1987) found that parents with fewer financial and personal resources were less likely to believe that they had control over their children’s developmental outcomes than were parents with more resources. Comparable findings have emerged with European American Midwestern families who experienced the farm crisis of the 1980s (Simons, Whitbeck, Conger, & Melby, 1990) and African American parents living in inner-city Philadelphia (Elder, Eccles, Ardelt, & Lord, 1995). In both studies, economic stresses were associated with a diminished sense of childrearing efficacy among parents. Because the present study focused on children’s academic and psychosocial competence, we assessed mothers’ beliefs in their capacity to engage in parenting practices that will enhance their children’s development in these domains.

Figure 1.

Figure 1

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Theoretical model testing for direct and indirect effects of financial resources, efficacy beliefs, and on children’s academic and psychosocial competence.

When people perceive themselves as competent, they set higher goals for themselves and become more committed to achieving those goals (Bandura, 1991). We therefore hypothesized that (1) mothers who are confident in their parenting ability will endorse developmental goals for their children that promote academic and psychosocial competence, and (2) these mothers will use parenting practices that will help their children achieve those goals. Young’s (1970, 1974) ethnographic work provided relevant information concerning developmental goals important to African American families with school-aged children living in the rural South. In her rich description of life in a Georgia rural community, Young synthesized a set of developmental goals that she believed were central to the socialization of rural African American children. These include obedience; respect for others; a focus on interpersonal relationships; a prosocial orientation that involves sharing, helping, and cooperating; and success in school. Numerous scholars have cited this work as a basis for developing similar constructs (cf. Allen, 1985; Billingsley, 1974; Brody & Stoneman, 1992; Grant, 1979; Peters & Massey, 1983; Willis, 1992).

The next phase in the proposed conceptual model specifies the paths through which a constellation of parenting practices are linked with academic and psychosocial functioning through children’s self-regulation. In constructing this model we have identified specific parenting practices as competence promoting for rural African American families, although it is possible that the same combination or subset of these practices also might promote competence among children in other ecological niches. The selection of rearing strategies to be included in the competence-promoting parenting composite was based on Young’s (1970, 1974) ethnographic work, feedback from focus groups of rural African American parents (Brody & Stoneman, 1992), and the studies previously cited.

Together, these sources of information converged to suggest that predictable family routines, parents’ involvement with their children’s schools, and affectively positive parent-child relationships will be linked with the development of self-regulation among rural African American children. Routinized and predictable home environments may enhance academic and psychosocial outcomes through their contribution to the development of self-regulation, by providing children with a secure base from which to navigate their community and school environments (Bradley, Rock, Caldwell, Harris, & Hamrick 1987; Brody et al., 1995; Taylor & Roberts, 1995). Likewise, both sociologists and psychologists have found parents’ involvement with their children’s schools to be important to youth achievement and psychosocial competence. Intermittent contact with teachers allows parents to receive feedback about their children’s progress and self-regulatory skills (Baker & Stevenson, 1986; Brody et al., 1995; Epstein & Becker, 1982). Positive parent-child relationships contribute to children’s development of a positive sense of self, decreasing the likelihood that they will develop problems with self-control and externalizing behavior (Sroufe & Fleeson, 1986). Such affectively positive parent-child relationships also have been found to be positively associated with self-regulation and achievement among African American children (Brody et al., 1995).

In the proposed model, competence-promoting parenting practices connect earlier links in the model to self-regulation. Self-regulation is a pivotal process that links parenting practices to child competencies. It focuses on individual differences in children’s ability to set goals, to persist while working toward those goals, and to be aware of the contingencies operating in their environments. These abilities are consistent with the developmental goals, described above, that rural African Americans hold. They also are consistent with findings from other research involving African American parents, in which the participants identified the purposes of parenting to be the fostering of planning abilities and sensitivity to environmental contingencies (Allen & Majidi-Ahi, 1989; Willis, 1992).

This study extends research on the linkages among financial hardship, family processes, and child academic and psychosocial outcomes in rural African American single-parent families, an understudied population. We examine the mediational pathways through which family financial stresses are associated with mothers’ efficacy beliefs and the developmental goals that they value for their children. The inclusion of the latter two variables serves as a bridge connecting financial stress to the actual parenting practices that operate as links to variation in child competence. The following analyses present an empirical evaluation of our conceptual model using a multimethod, multiinformant research design.

METHOD

Participants

From nonmetropolitan counties in Georgia, 139 African American single-mother-headed families with a 6- to 9-year old child were recruited. As defined by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, nonmetropolitan counties may include urbanized areas with populations of 20,000 or less. Only counties in which 25% or more of the population was African American were sampled to insure that a viable African American community existed in the county. Families were recruited through community contacts. An African American staff member contacted African American community members, such as pastors and teachers, and explained the research project to them. After community members understood the purposes of the project and developed trusting relationships with the staff member, the community members contacted prospective participant families and informed them of the purposes of the project. Each community contact gave to the research staff member the names of families who expressed interest in the project, and the staff member contacted the families. Each family was paid $100 for their participation in the study.

In 1993, the year in which the data reported here were collected, the mean per capita income for this sample of families was $2,568, with 82% of the families earning a per capita income of $3,300 or less. This, according to criteria established by the Census Bureau (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992), placed them in the first quintile for household income, which the bureau defines as poverty status. A little more than half of the mothers had less than a high school education, 34% had received a high school diploma, and 8% had completed an associate of arts or bachelor’s degree; 41% of them were employed. Total family annual income ranged from $2,532 to $62,412, and annual per capita income ranged from $636 to $9,648.

To enhance rapport and cultural understanding, African American students and community members served as home visitors to collect data from the families. Prior to data collection, the visitors received 1 month of training in administering the self-report instruments and conducting the observational procedures. These instruments and procedures were developed and refined with the help of a focus group of 40 African American community members who were representative of the population from which our sample was drawn. This focus group process has been described in detail elsewhere (Brody & Flor, 1997, 1998; Brody & Stoneman, 1992; Brody et al., 1995, 1996a, 1996b; Brody, Stoneman, Flor, & McCrary, 1994; Brody, Stoneman, Flor, McCrary, Hastings, & Conyers, 1994).

Procedure

Two home visits, each lasting 2 hours, were made to each family within a 7-day period, as the families’ schedules allowed. During the first visit, informed consent forms were completed. The mother consented to her own and her child’s participation in the study, and the child consented to his or her own participation. The mother also provided the name and location of the child’s school, and authorized the child’s teacher to provide the researchers with information concerning the child’s functioning at school.

At both home visits, mothers and children were videotaped in three activity contexts. One involved playing the board game Trouble™ (Hasbro, Inc., Providence, RI), in which players move pegs around a board in accordance with numbers rolled on a die; the player who gets all of his or her pegs into a “finish lane” first, wins. In another, the mother told the child a story from a picturebook, which served as a stimulus for parent-child interaction. The mother and child were also provided with a model constructed of Legos™ (Lego Systems Inc., Enfield, CT) and an assortment of Legos that they used to build a replica of the model provided. Each observational task lasted a minimum of 10 min. We have used these activities in our previous research involving rural African American families, because we have found them to be both understandable and interesting to children in the age groups with which we have worked (Brody, Stoneman, Flor, & McCrary, 1994; Brody, Stoneman, Flor, McCrary, Hastings, & Conyers, 1994).

At each home visit, self-report questionnaires were administered to the mother and the target child in an interview format. Each interview was conducted privately between each family member and a researcher, with no other family members present or able to overhear the conversation. At no time during the presentation of the self-report instruments did the researchers assume that a family member could read. This literacy concern was one of the reasons for presenting the questionnaires in an interview format. When responses to a Likert-type scale were required, the family member was shown a card with a series of dots in graduated sizes that corresponded to the magnitude of the responses from which he or she was to choose, and was asked to indicate his or her feelings using the dots on the card.

Perceived financial adequacy.

Mothers used three subscales from the Family Resource Scale (Dunst & Leet, 1987), with a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (almost always), to evaluate the adequacy of their families’ financial resources. The Necessities subscale included 10 items on which the mother indicated the extent to which enough money was available for necessities (i.e., food for two meals a day, heat for your house or apartment). The Cronbach α for this subscale was .83. The General Money subscale was comprised of three items (i.e., money to pay monthly bills); the Cronbach α was .69. The Money for Extras subscale included four items used to determine the adequacy of resources for expenses such as entertainment and the purchase of personal articles. The Cronbach α for this subscale was .84.

Parenting efficacy beliefs.

Parenting efficacy beliefs were assessed using the 34-item Parenting Efficacy Scale developed by Duke, Allen, and Halverson (1996). The measure consists of three subscales that assess parents’ beliefs in their efficacy concerning education, communication, and general efficacy. Each item is rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always). The subscales’ Cronbach α for this sample ranged from .66 to .74.

Developmental goals.

Mothers were asked to rate the importance of the following developmental goals for the target child: to be respectful, to be well educated, to get along with others, and to be well behaved. Each developmental goal was rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (slightly important) to 5 (extremely important). A similar measure, used in prior research with rural two-parent African American families, displayed good psychometric properties and was associated with measures of cognitive and social competence (Brody & Stoneman, 1992). The Cronbach α for the mothers in this sample was .70.

Competence-promoting parenting practices.

A composite measure of competence-promoting parenting practices was formed by combining information from three sources: mothers’ reports of family routines, observational ratings of mother-child interactions, and teachers’ reports of mothers’ involvement with their children’s schools. The data from each of these sources were standardized, then summed to form a competence-promoting parenting index. When a single indicator is used as a measure of a construct, it is assumed to be a perfect measure of that construct (i.e., λ is fixed to be 1).

Family routines were assessed using fourteen items selected from the Family Routines Inventory (Jensen, James, Boyce, & Hartnett, 1983), a 28-item scale designed to assess the degree to which children experience continuity or discontinuity in their day-to-day family routines. The score was derived from the mothers’ responses to a scale indicating the frequency (almost never, 1–2 times a week, 3–5 times a week, almost every day) with which routines such as “At least one parent has a regular play time with the children every day,” “Children do their homework at the same time each day or night during the week,” “Family has a ‘quiet time’ each evening when everyone talks or plays quietly,” and “Working parent(s) come home from work at the same time each day” take place. The Cronbach α for this scale was .67.

Mother-child relationship quality was assessed using the mother-child harmony ratings obtained for each of the three interactional contexts. These ratings were standardized and summed to create an observational assessment of mother-child harmony. African American student assistants received a minimum of 10 hours of training in observational coding, which included study and discussion of coding category definitions and observation of videotaped family interactions. The coders worked in teams of two, viewing the videotapes and independently rating the interactions’ harmony on the following scale: 1 (none: relationship between the mother and child is nonsup-portive, tense, with few displays of dyadic positive affect) to 5 (high: the dyadic relationship is warmly supportive, relaxed, with high rates of dyadic positive affect). This coding system was used in previous studies to assess mother-child and father-child relationship quality in a sample of two-parent African American families living in the rural Southeast (Brody et al., 1995, 1996a, 1996b). Interobserver agreement, calculated using Cohen’s κ, was .79. Coders who also worked as home visitors did not rate any families whose homes they had visited.

Maternal school involvement was comprised of a single teacher-reported indicator similar to those used in previous studies by Baker and Stevenson (1986), Brody et al. (1995), and Reynolds (1989). Each child’s teacher rated, dichotomously, 15 items indicating the various ways in which the mothers could be involved in their children’s schooling. A0 indicated that, to the teacher’s knowledge, the mother had never been involved in the school activity mentioned in the item. A1 indicated that the mother had been involved in the activity. The behaviors that the teachers rated included attending parent-teacher conferences, open houses, orientation meetings, and children’s programs; and volunteering to help with field trips and fundraisers. The Cronbach α for this measure was .86.

Child self-regulation.

Self-regulation was assessed using the self-control subscale of the Children’s Self-Control Scale (Humphrey, 1982). This subscale includes five items that mothers and teachers rated on a 5-point scale. The items were: thinks ahead of time about the consequences of his or her actions; plans ahead before acting; pays attention to what he or she is doing; works toward goals; and sticks to what he or she is doing, even on long, unpleasant tasks, until finished. The Cronbach α for mothers and teachers were .72 and .91, respectively.

Academic competence.

Two subscales from the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised (Woodcock & Johnson, 1990)—Quantitative Concepts and Passage Completion—were included in the academic competence latent construct. These subscales were selected because they are used to assess language and mathematics achievement. An African American research assistant administered the subscales to each child individually in the child’s home. These assistants learned to administer the Woodcock-Johnson subscales as part of their training. The Cronbach α exceeded .80 for each of the subscales.

Psychosocial competence.

Two indicators made up the psychosocial competence latent construct, the first of which was teacher ratings of the child’s competence using the six-item Social subscale of Harter’s (1982) Perceived Competence Scale for Children. The items were presented in a two-step, forced-choice format in which the respondent first indicated which of two contrasting statements best described the child; for example, “This child is not very popular with others his/her own age,” versus “This child is popular with others his/her own age.” In the second step, the respondent indicated whether the chosen statement was “really true” or “sort of true” for the child. The Cronbach α was .88.

The second indicator of the psychosocial competence construct indexed conduct problems. Teachers completed the 10-item conduct disorder subscale from the Revised Behavior Problem Checklist (Quay & Peterson, 1987). The Cronbach α for this scale was .90.

RESULTS

Latent variable structural equation models were constructed to test the hypothesized model. Maximum likelihood estimates of the model coefficients were obtained using LISREL 8 (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1993). Table 1 presents the correlation matrices, means, and standard deviations for the variables used in the analysis. The data were not analyzed separately by child gender because the ratio of study variables to cases falls below acceptable levels for LISREL when the sample is so divided (see Bollen, 1989). The model was estimated by examining the measurement and structural models simultaneously. The first indicator within each construct was fixed at 1.0. We allowed significant correlated measurement error terms for the developmental goals measures to covary to correct for the association among these indicators due to shared method variance. The modification indexes indicated that no other residuals needed to be correlated.

Table 1.

Means, Standard, and Intercorrelations among the Study Variables

Study Measures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
1. General money
2. Money for necessities .74
3. Money for extras .55 .42
4. Parenting efficacy, general .17 .21 .09
5. Efficacy, education .07 .12 .05 .63
6. Efficacy, communication .17 .23 .09 .65 69
7. Efficacy, discipline −.03 .03 .07 .64 .62 .67
8. Goal to be respectful .05 .14 −.02 .06 .13 .07 .07
9. Goal to be well educated .08 .21 .03 .13 .08 .11 .15 .47
10. Goal to be well behaved .08 .18 .04 .29 .23 .27 .29 .42 .43
11. Goal to get along .01 −.02 −.08 .21 .27 .27 .25 .46 .21 .37
12. Competence-promoting parenting .09 .12 .08 .15 .08 .11 .11 .03 .24 .20 .17
13. Self-regulation, mother’s report .11 .12 .24 .20 .21 .17 .24 −.02 .08 −.07 .10 .26
14. Self-regulation, teacher’s report −.07 −.03 .02 −.11 −.12 −.06 −.10 .13 .17 −.01 .07 .26 .21
15. Passage completion −.12 −.05 −.11 .13 .09 .01 .20 .03 .19 −.03 .04 .16 .25 .13
16. Quantitative concepts −.09 −.05 −.10 .12 .12 0 .12 .02 .18 −.05 .03 .17 .19 .15 .78
17. Social competence, teacher’s report −.07 −.04 −.14 −.02 −.05 .02 −.05 .004 .07 −.07 .07 .17 .02 .45 .05 .05
18. Conduct disorder, teacher’s report .05 −.07 −.03 .12 .09 .01 .13 −.06 .04 .05 −.02 −.23 −.20 −.67 .04 .05 −.49
M 8.31 35.5 6.08 49.8 8.78 17.5 28.2 4.50 4.72 4.62 4.14 1.19 11.5 15.6 11.8 18.6 17.7 27.3
SD 2.83 8.66 3.98 6.01 1.24 2.44 4.10 .73 .58 .65 .90 .95 3.62 4.18 7.86 6.77 3.46 8.31
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Note: For r > .16, p < .05. N = 139.

The two demographic variables, mothers’ education and family size, were examined for their association with the study variables to determine whether any should be controlled when the structural coefficients were estimated. Family size was negatively associated with the availability of enough money for necessities, r(139) = −.18, p < .03. Mothers’ education was correlated with three of the eighteen study variables: Higher educational attainment was associated with the availability of enough money for necessities, r(139) = .23, p < .01, and with children’s performance on the two subscales of the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Assessment, passage comprehension and arithmetic quantification, r(139) = .17, p < .04, and r(139) = .19, p < .03, respectively. The estimation of all structural coefficients was estimated with and without mothers’ educational attainment controlled. Controlling for mothers’ education did not affect either the estimation of the structural coefficients or the fit of the data to the hypothetical model. To simplify the presentation, the structural coefficients presented below do not include the control for maternal education.

Figure 2 presents the standardized maximum likelihood estimates of the model. The inclusion of a smaller number of cases than the total reflects listwise deletion for any missing data. As shown in the figure, factor loadings for the indicators of each latent construct are reasonably high. In line with previous findings that different informants’ reports about individual characteristics and behaviors typically do not correspond highly (Achenbach, McConaughy, & Howell, 1987; Forehand et al., 1988), the loading for the mothers’ indicator for self-regulation was .28, whereas the loading for the teachers’ indicator for self-regulation was .80, although both were statistically significant. Achenbach et al. (1987) suggest that, although they may not display even moderate levels of convergence, reports by different sources contribute different information, making multiple perspectives valuable.

Figure 2.

Figure 2

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Direct and indirect effects of financial resources, efficacy beliefs, and developmental goals on children’s academic and psychosocial competence. χ2(112, N = 133) = 148.96, p < .01; GFI = .90. * p < .05; ** p < .01.

Turning to the standardized structural coefficients, the goodness-of-fit indexes, GFI = .90, suggest that the data fit the hypothesized mediational model adequately (Bollen, 1989). Mothers’ reports of financial resource adequacy were significantly related to their beliefs about the efficacy of their parenting, β = .10. As expected, mothers’ parenting efficacy beliefs predicted the developmental goals they endorsed for their children, β = .35. In turn, the developmental goals predicted the mothers’ use of competence-promoting parenting practices, β = .19. The nonsignificant link between maternal efficacy beliefs and competence-promoting parenting practices, β = .06, was inconsistent with the hypothetical model. Instead, the data indicate that maternal efficacy beliefs were linked indirectly with competence-promoting parenting practices through their association with competence-promoting developmental goals. Consistent with the hypothetical model, competence-promoting parenting practices were indirectly associated with children’s academic competence, β = .38, and psychosocial competence, β = .31, through children’s self-regulation. Parental practices that include routinized home environments, affectively positive mother-child relationships, and mothers’ involvement in their children’s schools were linked with children’s ability to regulate their own behavior. In turn, children’s self-regulation was associated with both academic and psychosocial competence. The LISREL analyses were executed with 17 indicators and a sample size of 133. Maximum likelihood estimates become more stable with larger samples and higher sample-to-variable ratios. The data also were analyzed using latent variable path analysis with partial least squares estimation procedures (LVPLS; Lohmoeller, 1989). LVPLS allows structural equation modeling with data that do not meet the restrictive assumptions needed for use of maximum likelihood techniques. The LVPLS analysis replicated the LISREL results.

To evaluate more fully the fit of the theoretical model, we conducted an incremental fit test to compare our model with a fully recursive model within a nested model comparison framework (Bollen, 1989). A fully recursive model is one in which all directioned paths from prior constructs are estimated. This model was used to test for any significant improvement over the hypothesized model when the following direct effects were added: financial resources to developmental goals, parenting, self-regulation, academic competence, and psychosocial competence; efficacy beliefs to self-regulation, academic competence, and psychosocial competence; developmental goals to self-regulation, academic competence, and psychosocial competence; and competence-promoting parenting to academic and psychosocial competence. None of the added directioned paths attained a t of 1.8, indicating no significant improvement over our hypothesized model for the fully recursive model. With a sacrifice of 13 degrees of freedom, the reduction in χ2 was 12.51, df = 13, ns. Consistent with our examination of the data, these results support the hypothetical model’s validity.

DISCUSSION

This study was designed to examine the links between the perceived adequacy of family financial resources and child competence among a sample of African American single-parent families living in rural Georgia. Based on both observational and participant-reported data, our findings described the links among perceived financial resources, efficacy beliefs, developmental goals, parenting practices, and child competence in academic and psychosocial areas. The results were consistent with Young’s (1970, 1974) ethnographic analyses, in which she found harmonious parent-child relationships, consistent home environments, and developmental goals similar to those assessed in this study to be associated with competence among the rural African American children she studied. The results reported in this article, along with those from earlier studies conducted with this sample (Brody & Flor, 1997, 1998), describe the links between the parenting behaviors of African American mothers living in rural Georgia and maternal resources (years of education), perceived adequacy of financial resources, maternal psychological functioning (self-esteem and depression), and religiosity. The present study extended these findings by delineating the pivotal role that maternal beliefs and developmental goals play in linking perceptions of family financial adequacy to competence-promoting parenting behavior.

As hypothesized, when perceived family financial resources were more adequate, mothers were more likely to believe that their parenting would be effective. These results are consistent with those that emerged among two-parent farm families in Iowa (Conger et al., 1992) and single-parent families in urban Philadelphia (Elder et al., 1995), extending them to rural African American mothers. As social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1989) suggests, mothers’ efficacy beliefs in turn were linked to the developmental goals they endorsed for their children. Those mothers who believed that they could influence their children’s development were more likely to endorse developmental goals such as education, respect for others in the community, and concern for others. Endorsement of these goals was associated with a greater likelihood that the mothers would use home management and parenting practices likely to promote competence.

Contrary to our predictions, however, maternal efficacy beliefs were not linked to competence-promoting parenting practices. Because previous studies of the associations between parental efficacy beliefs and parenting practices have not examined and controlled for developmental goals, it is not possible to know whether similar results would have emerged among other populations. Our findings, however, are consistent with Bandura’s (1989) hypothesis that efficacy beliefs affect motivational processes such as goal setting, which in turn influence goal-directed behavior. Future research should provide more information that can be used to determine whether parental efficacy beliefs are linked directly with parenting behavior or mediated through the goals, aspirations, and expectations that parents hold for their children.

The results from the tests of the hypothesized model and the alternative fully recursive model are consistent with the formulations proposed in general systems (Huston, McLoyd, & Garcia-Coll, 1994) and ecologically oriented (Conger & Elder, 1994) models of development concerning the ways in which economic stress is linked with child development outcomes. The proponents of these theories argue that economic hardship is linked with parental psychological functioning, beliefs, and parenting practices, which in turn are linked with variations in children’s competence. Both in these formulations and in the present study, perceived financial hardship is construed as a distal parameter that is linked with proximal family processes such as competence-promoting parenting practices, which in turn are linked with variations in children’s development. The results of the present study replicate and extend these formulations.

In any group of families, including those who participated in this study, great diversity exists. We should not overlook the likelihood that factors not included in this study could moderate the linkages among the variables, particularly those between the adequacy of perceived financial resources and maternal efficacy beliefs. Some single parents receive emotional and instrumental support from extended family members, improving parental dispositions and psychological functioning (Taylor & Roberts, 1995). Such support can provide a single mother with a sounding board for dealing with the daily hassles that often accompany economic stress, in addition to the opportunity to discuss childrearing issues. Similarly, some single mothers may be able to observe and be mentored by community members or child-care professionals who acquaint them with rearing and home management strategies that promote positive child development (Burchinal, Campbell, Bryant, Wasik, & Ramey, 1997). The availability of such resilience-promoting social networks for single mothers and their children is often overlooked.

The finding that child self-regulation mediates the link of competence-promoting parenting with academic achievement and psychosocial competence is in accord with prior research conducted with other populations. Steinberg and associates (Steinberg, Elmen, & Mounts, 1989) found that European American youths’ ability to set goals and make plans for attaining them served as mediators between authoritative parenting practices and academic performance. Findings from our studies involving two-parent rural African American families further corroborate the generality of this relation. The results of the present study further illustrate the importance of self-regulation in various spheres of functioning. In addition, in both the present study and those cited above, children’s ability to regulate their behavior by setting goals, making plans, and persisting was not associated with their families’ financial resources. Thus, the links between parenting practices and children’s self-regulatory competence do not appear to be specific to a particular socioeconomic level.

Limitations of this study and some caveats must be noted. First, it is not known whether the model tested in this study would generalize to urban families or to European American families living in the same rural communities. The model tested in this study was developed with particular sensitivity to the demands of rearing African American children in rural areas. Second, the proposed model is not intended to be exhaustive. Models that include different parameters than those included in the present model could also account for variation in the outcome assessments. Third, although the paths between variables in the model may imply causality, at this point we can only test the extent to which the observed variables can be predicted from the hypothesized model without respect to direction of effects. Future research in which longitudinal assessments of children’s competence are conducted should build on the present results. These studies should include variables similar to those presented here, as well as measures of familial and extrafamilial social support, additional areas of family functioning, and child characteristics such as temperament.

In conclusion, few studies have addressed the associations between specific aspects of the environment and variations in developmental outcomes among rural African American school-aged children. The results of the present study help to fill this void by describing the ways in which mothers’ developmental goals for their children are tied to both the mothers’ sense of efficacy and the types of rearing practices that they use to attain their goals. Parents who are confident about their childrearing effectiveness despite economic adversity formulate for their children developmental goals that are translated into rearing strategies that enhance children’s abilities to set their own goals, to plan, and to persist until the goals are attained. In this process a combination of three parental variables appear to serve as links enabling children to develop academic and psychosocial competence: a strong sense of parenting efficacy; developmental goals that emphasize education, prosocial orientations, and respect for authority in the rural African American community; and the use of competence-promoting rearing practices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Contributor Information

Gene H. Brody, Department of Child and Family Development, Dawson Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602;

Douglas L. Flor, University of Georgia.

Nicole Morgan Gibson, University of Georgia..

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