by Nicole Giuliani, Assistant Professor, School Psychology Program

It is common knowledge that parenting a young child can be stressful. Much of the stresses and labors of family life fall disproportionately to mothers, which may be especially challenging in families with few economic resources. What impact does this have on mothers of young children, especially with regard to their health? And how might individual mothers protect against these effects? In this study, my students, collaborator Dr. Michelle Byrne, and I are investigating how different environmental and individual factors may exacerbate or alleviate the effects of parenting stress on mothers.  

Increasing levels of maternal employment over the last fifty years have not resulted in more equitable gender distribution of household work and childcare time. Unlike fathers, mothers sacrifice their own personal care, leisure, and sleep to preserve childcare time even as their number of paid work hours go up. These stressors may be exacerbated among mothers lower in socioeconomic status (SES), who have fewer economic resources, less earning power, and lower education than their higher-SES counterparts. For example, recent work found that less-educated parents share housework less equally and have less progressive gender attitudes than highly-educated parents.  

A large literature has documented the link between low SES and increased health risks, including coronary heart disease and immune-related disorders. This is thought to occur when the chronic psychosocial stress of the daily strains of poverty gets “under the skin” via increased circulating stress hormones, which impair immune function. High levels of inflammation occur when the immune system is activated, either in response to biological or psychosocial stressors over which an individual perceives they have little or no control. Parenting stress occurs when the demands of the parenting role exceed the availability of resources to meet them, often regarding contexts such as family income and parental education. As such, the existing health risks experienced by low-SES individuals may then be compounded by increases in parenting stress experienced by some of these mothers. This, then, may be reflected in high levels of inflammation. 

While the magnitude of the association between SES and inflammation may be multiplied by parenting stress, it may also be buffered by mothers’ coping abilities. Self-regulation (SR) is the process by which people control their own actions as they move toward or away from various goals, and is positively associated with more active, adaptive coping. Therefore, it may be that a mother’s SR ability moderates the association between SES, parenting stress, and inflammation by providing her with a means of managing the stress. While much work has focused on the effects of these multiple risk factors on children growing up in low-SES households, very little has addressed how this affects parents. Indeed, the association between parent SR, parenting stress, and inflammation has never been tested, and there is a lack of work examining how these multiple facets of identity interact to prevent mothers in particular from achieving optimal health. 

Thanks in part to funding from the CSWS Faculty Research Grant, we brought 88 mother-child dyads into the lab at UO’s Prevention Science Institute in order to address these gaps in the literature. To qualify for the study, children had to be between ages 3 and 6 (mean age = 4.05 years), and their biological mothers had to have custody of the child at least half-time. We recruited our sample from the community in the Eugene/Springfield area, and our mothers reported a family income ranging from $0-260,000 per year (mean = $69,329) and years of education ranging from 8 through 22 (mean = 15.15 years; a bachelor’s degree corresponds to 16 years). As part of a much larger study on parenting and self-regulation, these mothers completed a wide array of surveys about their levels of parenting stress and related constructs including depression and fatigue, and performed several different SR tasks. They also provided us with a saliva sample, from which we assayed four markers of immune functioning: c-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-1 beta (IL1b), secretory immunoglobulin A (SigA), and interleukin-6 (IL6).  

Our first question was how parenting stress was associated with inflammation in this sample of mothers. In our analyses, one marker of maternal stress seemed to rise above the rest: fatigue. We found that self-reported fatigue among these mothers was significantly positively correlated with levels of IL1b. In other words, mothers of preschoolers who reported being more exhausted had higher levels of this inflammatory marker.  

Our second question was whether this association was moderated by SES—was the magnitude of this effect greater in low- versus high-SES mothers? We found that the association between maternal fatigue and a different marker, CRP, was significantly affected by maternal education. Mothers who had not earned their bachelor’s degree showed a significant positive correlation between fatigue and CRP, which was not seen in the more highly-educated mothers. In other words, education seems to buffer these mothers from the effect of fatigue on inflammation. 

Our last question was whether this association was moderated by laboratory-measured levels of maternal self-regulation. We found trend-level support for this effect—mothers who showed poorer SR in the lab had a strong positive correlation between fatigue and inflammation, which did not exist among the mothers who performed better on our SR tasks. In other words, SR may be an effective buffer against the detrimental effects of fatigue on inflammation among mothers of young children. 

These results provide preliminary evidence that fatigue may be a particularly detrimental aspect of parenting on immune health among mothers of young children, the effects of which may be buffered both by education and self-regulation skills. In future work, we hope to identify what aspects of self-regulation may be most protective to inform interventions, as well as how these skills are passed from mother to child.  

—Nicole R. Giuliani, PhD, is Evergreen Assistant Professor, Special Education and Clinical Sciences, Prevention Science Graduate Programs, College of Education, Prevention Science Institute  at UO.