This longitudinal project examines the impact of parents' occupational conditions on parenting and, in turn, children's social, cognitive, emotional, and linguistic development. A sample of 1400 predominately low-income European-American and African-American families will be drawn from 6 rural counties in Pennsylvania and North Carolina by recruiting mothers at hospitals following the births of their infants. Home visits will be conducted when the infants are 6, 15, 24, and 36 months old during which mother and father (or another co-residential care giver, e.g., mother's cohabiting partner; child's grandmother) will complete questionnaires about their work, personal characteristics, family relationships, and their child's psychosocial functioning, and home observations will be conducted of parent-child interaction. This project, part of a larger, collaborative program project, will focus on all parents who are employed at least part-time with an eye to how occupational conditions (i.e., wages and benefits, time and timing, opportunities for self-direction, stress) make their mark on parents, parenting, and, ultimately, the child's psychosocial functioning. Analyses will include attention to selection effects into work and processes that mediate and moderate the connections between parents' work, family dynamics, and children's unfolding development. Longitudinal analyses will focus on how changes in parents' occupational circumstances are linked to longitudinal trajectories of parenting and children's psychosocial functioning. Analyses focused on dual-earner families will take a dyadic approach, examining the contributions of parents' jobs individually and in combination. The study will also examine whether the associations of interest vary as a function of community context, defined both in terms of extent of rurality and extent of poverty.
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