Material Hardship and Adolescent Internalizing and Externalizing: Mediating and Moderating Roles of Mothers’ Parenting Stress and Fathers’ Social Support

According to the family stress model (Conger, 1994; Conger et al., 1990), experiencing material hardship such as food insecurity or housing instability may negatively affect adolescents directly and indirectly by undermining parents’ psychological resources. The current study examined whether there was an indirect effect of material hardship on adolescent internalizing and externalizing behaviors through maternal parenting stress. Further, the study examined whether the indirect effect of food insecurity and housing instability varied as a function of two forms of paternal social support, coparenting support and father engagement. The sample included 2,609 mothers, fathers, and their children (51.2% boys) from The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). Mediation and moderated mediation analyses were used in this study and were executed using the PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2018). The results showed that maternal parenting stress fully mediated the relationship between (1) food insecurity and adolescent internalizing (i.e., anxiety and depression) (2) food insecurity and adolescent externalizing and (3) housing instability and adolescent depression. There was evidence that maternal parenting stress partially mediated the relationship between (1) housing instability and adolescent anxiety and (2) housing instability and adolescent externalizing. Furthermore, moderated mediation analyses revealed that neither father coparenting support nor father engagement moderated the indirect effect of material hardship on adolescent outcomes through maternal parenting stress. Overall, the findings provide evidence to suggest the long-term, longitudinal impact of material hardship on adolescent psychosocial and behavioral outcomes through maternal parenting stress.