ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Human Developmental Psychology
Home, School, and the Hidden Cost of Parental Mental Health
Provisionally accepted
- University of Delaware, Newark, United States
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This study examines the association between parental mental health and children's socioeconomic status (SES) across both home and school environments, using nationally representative data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Traditional childhood SES markers often focus on parental income, occupational prestige, and maternal education; however, they may not fully capture how children's proximal experiences of SES differ across daily contexts due to parents' personal challenges. Employing latent variable path analyses (LVPA), we explored whether parents' mental health, often a critical aspect of childhood adversity, shapes both home-based and school-based SES. Our findings revealed that poorer parental mental health is significantly linked to more disadvantaged SES in home and school settings. This suggests that parental mental health may affect not only the resources families possess but also the degree to which children benefit from those resources across critical developmental settings. These findings highlight the importance of addressing parental mental health as a key mechanism in understanding and reducing invisible developmental inequality.
Keywords: parental mental health, Psychosocial determinants, Childhood Socioeconomic Status, school socioeconomic status, Family socioeconomic status, home socioeconomic status, childhood inequality, developmental inequality
Received: 09 Jun 2025; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou and Del Tufo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jingwen Zhou
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