Stress Impacts Good Parenting
The behavioral economists perspective
Should parents be strict or permissive? Do “tiger moms” and “helicopter parents” raise more successful, happier, well-adjusted children than “slacker parents” do? These kinds of debates regularly litter popular magazines, parenting books and even the scientific literature. There is no formula for how to raise children well, and likely there never will be. Yet the science does tell us how not to raise children. Don’t be inattentive. Don’t be inconsistent. Don’t be disengaged. Don’t place them in intellectually pallid environments.
The science doesn’t just agree on what not to do. Sadly it agrees on something else: low-income parents are much more likely to do these things. We know children born to low-income families do poorly on average. And one culprit seems to be the behavior of low-income parents
While there is agreement on the behavior, there is little agreement on why. Why are low-income parents not giving their children as much attention, help and encouragement as they need? Different ends of the political spectrum point in different directions. The left tends to see a lack of parenting skills. They look for solutions that emphasize improving these skills. The right tends to see more personal failures. They look for solutions that emphasize getting parents to take more responsibility.
As behavioral economists, we believe something else is going on.
Picture this: you have a deadline looming over you for an important project. Missing it or cutting corners is simply not an option. As you head out the door to go home, you realize one of your team members has made a big mistake, putting the deadline at serious risk. That night, only a part of you is at home. The other part is still ruminating on the deadline. Your child makes a small, innocuous mistake that evening; maybe she knocks her glass off the table while playing with her food. Annoyed, you snap at her. You are all too loud and needlessly send her to her room. Later that night, you regret it.
Being a good parent, even when you know what to do, is hard. It requires constant attention, effort and stead- fastness. Children need to be motivated to do things they dislike (like homework or learning their tables); appointments have to be kept; activities chosen and planned; children ferried to classes and games. Teachers have to be met; their feedback incorporated; tutoring or extra help provided or procured. Children’s social lives and how they spend their spare time has to be kept track of.
Good parenting requires psychic resources. Complex decisions must be made. Sacrifices must be made in the moment. This is hard for anyone, whatever their income: we all have limited reserves of self-control, and attention and other psychic resources. In that moment, fretting about the deadline, your psychic resources were depleted. Facing pressure at work, you did not have the freedom of mind needed to exercise patience, prioritize and do what you knew to be right. To an outsider, in that moment, you would look like a bad parent.
Low-income parents, however, also face a tax on their psychic resources. Many things that are trifling and routine to the well-off give sleepless nights to those less fortunate. To take a simple example, everyone may face the same bank overdraft fees – but steering clear of them is pretty easy for the well-off, while for the poor it requires constant attention, steely reserve and enormous amounts of self-control. For the well-off, monthly bills are automatically deducted and there is still some slack left over. For those with less income, finding ways to ensure that rent, utilities and phone bills are paid for out of small, irregular paychecks is an act of complicated financial jugglery.
Shocks get magnified. For the well-off, a broken- down car is little more than a temporary annoyance; if needed, they can “just take a cab.” For those with less income, it necessitates real, meaningful trade-offs and painful sacrifices. If taking a cab becomes unavoidable, it may mean having to spend less on groceries. It may mean cutting back on the time spent with a child on account of having to work extra hours to make up for the unexpected expense. Equally, trying to avoid shelling out the cab fare may mean taking an extra couple of hours to get to work, with less time and energy left over for other things, not least supervising a child’s school- work and keeping tabs on his social life.
When cash is tight, that feeling you have when that deadline was looming, becomes a constant mental state. Well-off people have the luxury of freedom of mind. Their psychic resources are reserved for “difficult,” “important” things that have a big impact on their well- being in the long run. But those with less income are not as fortunate. They have the same (limited) capacity for self-control and attention – but are forced to expend a large fraction of it on dealing with the ups and downs of everyday life. Simply managing the basics of life uses psychic resources.
This leaves less psychic resources for the important things in life. Part of the mind is constantly fretting about putting food on the table. Put in this light, is it any surprise that low-income parents look like worse parents?
This has dramatic implications for policy. For instance, many standard policies that aim to improve outcomes for children from low-income families impose additional conditions – take your child to an additional program, monitor his progress, attend regular meetings – that amount to a further tax on already limited available mental bandwidth. Behavioral science thus suggests that such policies by themselves are unlikely to be as successful as one might hope.
Instead, a very good parenting program may not look like one at all. Deal with the economic instability that taxes psychic resources. For example, stabilize incomes, provide low-income credit alternatives to deal with the ups and downs of life, or ensure stable housing. These may not be “parenting” programs in the conventional sense of the term. But by freeing up psychic resources they allow people to be the parents they want to be. They allow more traditional parental skills programs to be more successful.
So, what does it take to be a good parent? Freedom of mind. And that is a luxury low-income parents often cannot afford.
Supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, ideas42 is a social science research and development laboratory at Harvard University that uses scientific insights to design innovative policies and products, domestically and internationally.
