Parent-Child Interactions

Living in poverty can affect the chemical make-up of our bodies in ways that undermine parents’ abilities to provide the safe, strong, nurturing relationships that young children need for healthy language, cognitive, and social-emotional development.¹ Repeated stress—such as not knowing where the next meal is coming from—results in more easily triggered, more frequent, and longer-lasting bursts of stress hormones, which impact health, learning, decision-making abilities, and self-regulation.² Successful parenting interventions address these chronic stressors, in addition to building parents’ skills and providing them with information about child development.

Prenatal and post-partum depression are risks to healthy parent-child interactions. Maternal depression can endanger young children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and behavioral development. It can also impact their learning and physical and mental health over the long term.¹ Although most research has been on maternal depression, fathers also experience depression. Estimates of paternal depression in the first several months after the birth of a child range from four to 25 percent of new fathers.²

• Depression and stress prior to birth can reduce expectant mothers’ participation in prenatal care. It can also transmit high levels of stress hormones to the unborn child through the placenta. These conditions can also cause babies to be born preterm and/or at low birthweight.
• Mothers’ and fathers’ stress and depression after a baby’s birth can reduce parent-child interactions, impacting children’s social-emotional and language development. Untreated maternal depression can increase the risk of child maltreatment as well as children’s own risk of depression, separation anxiety, and difficult behavior.³ Between 10 and 20 percent of pre- and post-partum women experience clinically diagnosable depression. Among low-income mothers, the rate is even higher at 60 percent.⁴

Grandparents who become primary caregivers experience a great deal of satisfaction from taking on this role, but many also experience:

• Depression,
• Health problems,
• Legal and financial problems,
• Conflicts in their marriages and work, and
• Social isolation and stigma.¹

American Community Survey data from 2008-2012 found that seven percent of North Carolina children under age 18 (170,000) lived in families headed by grandparents. Of these, nearly half were five years of age or younger.² About half of these grandparents were the sole caregivers for their grandchildren, and most had been caring for them for years.³ Between 2007 and 2015 there was a substantial increase in the numbers of children living with grandparents.⁴