How Does Relief of Poverty Affect Childrens Psychopathology?
We ran a series of test for mediators of the link between poverty and psychopathology; that is, factors causally related to the symptoms that could be affected by relief from poverty. A strict mediational model34 requires that the significant effect of changing poverty status on the children’s symptoms should become less significant once the putative mediator is entered into the model; the mediator itself must be significantly associated with poverty status. Potential mediators examined were traumatic life events (eg, parent separation or divorce, sexual or other physical abuse, unplanned pregnancy), neglect, harsh or inconsistent parenting, overprotective or intrusive parenting, lax supervision, and maternal depression. Only 1 stressor met the requirements specified by Baron and Kenny34 as a full mediator: failure of parents to provide adequate supervision. This stressor was coded from parents’ answers to a set of questions such as, “How often is [the subject] out without your knowing
