Effects of household chaos on mothers and children
This is a long summary of an interesting article. Oliver & Midouhas (2023) published “Maternal Psychological Distress and Children’s Adjustment Problems: Mediation by household chaos” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the highly edited article:
Research over many decades has considered the crucial role of maternal psychological distress (e.g., depression, anxiety) for children’s psychological adjustment (externalizing and internalizing problems), suggesting bidirectional influences over time. However, little is known about the extent to which household chaos (e.g., noise, disorganization, lack of calm) may mediate this mutual association, despite an understanding that chaos is a powerful stressor in the home. Using what we term a mutual-mediation model, we found that both maternal psychological distress and children’s adjustment problems predicted household chaos at Age 5, and in turn, that chaos predicted maternal psychological distress and child adjustment problems at Age 7. We found a dominance of children’s externalizing problems in the prediction of household chaos, and all pathways were strongest for maternal psychological distress and externalizing problems compared to child internalizing problems. Our findings suggest that research would be well-minded to consider both child and parent effects on household chaos, as well as its mediation potential.
Global health priorities increasingly acknowledge psychological adjustment and mental health. Childhood adjustment problems including internalizing problems (anxiety, depression, emotional problems) and externalizing problems (aggression, oppositionality, conduct problems) are seen as primary precursors of diverse adult social, life-chance and mental-health outcomes, and around half of all adult mental-health disorders manifest before the age of 18. Importantly, the considerable prevalence of parents’ psychological distress is also of grave concern, since parents’ own psychological needs are understood to be key drivers of the onset and maintenance of their children’s adjustment difficulties. Indeed, the psychological health of parents and children are mutual influences, and understanding mechanisms that may mediate these associations is crucial. Here, we examine the potential role of household chaos in bidirectional associations between parent and child mental health.
Household chaos refers to a cluster of characteristics of the home environment such as noise, a lack of routine and order, and a sense of rush rather than calm, and is increasingly considered a proximal stressor that relates to diverse outcomes for both children and adults in the home.
Although associated with disadvantage, household chaos is not a substitute for poverty or low socioeconomic status and is seen to have independent detrimental effects. Moreover, many scholars have suggested that chaos has the potential to intensify the effects of other stressors, such as socioeconomic factors, parental executive function, and hostile parenting, on child outcomes. In addition to this moderating role, chaos may also mediate the influence of proximal stressors on child and adult outcomes since these stressors can influence parents’ capacity to maintain structure and organization in the home. Of particular interest in terms of this mediation by chaos is the association between parental psychological distress and children’s adjustment problems.
Most research in this area has focused on parental psychological distress as mediating associations between chaos and children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors. However, another plausible model is that chaos has a mechanistic role in associations between parental psychological distress and child adjustment outcomes, since psychological distress has been shown to affect parental emotion regulation and executive function, which are likely to influence parents’ ability to keep the household calm and routinized. This notion has been formally supported using maternal reports in a COVID-19-lockdown study of 230 children in Israel as well as a cross-sectional study in the United States of more than 400 preschool children. In the latter study, significant mediation was only evident for maternal-reported outcomes, not observer-assessed behavioral self-regulation in children. While potentially due to shared method variance, this finding may also underline the importance of perception, since depressed parents may perceive their children more negatively, and potentially their household as more chaotic.
Although recognized for many years, the crucial influence children have on their parents is commonly neglected in research. Here, we put forward a mutual-mediation model whereby chaos mediates both the influences of parental psychological distress on children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors and the influence of children’s behaviors on parental psychological distress. Our posited model is founded on the understanding that children’s behaviors can affect parental sense of competence and parenting, that most studies associating chaos with adult and child outcomes are not designed to unpick direction of effect, and that bidirectional processes between parents’ and children’s psychological distress and behaviors, and chaos are common.
Using data from the U.K. Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a large, prospective cohort study, we examined longitudinal associations between maternal psychological distress and children’s adjustment across early- and middle-childhood (Ages 3–7 years), testing a mutual-mediation model and hypothesizing that child internalizing and externalizing behaviors and parental psychological distress at Age 3 would influence child behaviors and parental distress at Age 7, with chaos at Age 5 mediating these pathways.
MCS is a longitudinal cohort study taking its sample from all U.K. births over a 1-year period, from September 1, 2000. Using a stratified cluster sampling approach, MCS was sampled to overrepresent areas with high proportions of ethnic minority, high child poverty. Parents gave informed consent to participate. MCS has ethical approval from U.K. National Health Service Multicentre Ethics Committees; additional approval was not required for this secondary analysis. Demographic data were collected at Age 3, parental psychological distress and child adjustment at child Ages 3 and 7, and household chaos at Age 5. Our analytic sample comprised families who had data on all model variables—a complete-case sample of 8,388—and included one child per family (first born where there were twins or triplets). One quarter of mothers had a university degree or higher, around one fifth lived below the poverty line and four fifths had a partner at home. Around half of the children were female and 94% were from a White ethnic background.
Mothers self-reported their own psychological distress using the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6+; Kessler et al., 2002). The K6+ is a six-item screener with questions about frequency of feelings in the past month (sad, nervous, restless/fidgety, hopeless, everything is an effort, worthless) and has robust psychometric qualities (Cronbach’s α = .86 and .88 at Ages 3 and 7, respectively). Children’s adjustment was measured using maternal reports on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (R. Goodman, 2001). Internalizing behaviors were measured with 10 items (e.g., “Often unhappy, down-hearted or tearful”) from the emotional symptoms and peer problems scales at Ages 3 and 7 (α = .59–.71, respectively). Externalizing behaviors (e.g., “Often has temper tantrums or hot tempers”) were measured with 10 items from the conduct problems and hyperactivity/inattention scales at Ages 3 and 7 (α = .78–.81). These externalizing and internalizing scales are recommended for the measurement of psychological adjustment in low-risk samples (A. Goodman et al., 2010). Mothers reported on three items indexing chaos at Age 5 including whether the household is calm (reverse-coded), disorganized, and whether you “can’t hear yourself think” (Parkes et al., 2013; Cronbach’s α = .66). Items were originally taken from the Confusion, Order and Hubbub scale (Matheny et al., 1995).
We controlled for several parent (maternal education, income poverty status, and family structure) and child factors (child gender, age, and ethnicity). With regard to family-level covariates, income poverty status (below the poverty line, set for equivalized net family income at 60% of the U.K. national median household income) and family structure (two parents or not) were measured at our baseline time point (Age 3). Maternal education was measured with a binary indicator of whether the mother achieved a university degree or higher degree by the end of our study period (Age 7 years). Child age in years was measured at our baseline time point and ethnicity had six categories: White, mixed, Indian, Pakistani/Bangladeshi, Black, and other.
In a large prospective longitudinal study, we examined household chaos as a mediator of the bidirectional relationship between maternal psychological distress and children’s externalizing and internalizing behaviors over time. Our findings support our posited mutual-mediation model whereby maternal distress and children’s adjustment influence each other over time via household chaos. Although not, to our knowledge, previously explicitly modeled in this way, our results align with those showing chaos as mediating associations between maternal reports of distress and children’s socioemotional outcomes (Gordon-Hacker et al., 2023; Hur et al., 2015), as well as reciprocal influences of parent and child psychological distress and behaviors (Sifaki et al., 2021; Speyer et al., 2022). We extend these findings, suggesting mutual influences on the home environment by parents and children that are in turn important for negative psychological outcomes for them both, even after accounting for behavioral stability.
Research has shown that behavioral problems predict elevated chaos in the home, and our stronger mediation by chaos of the reciprocal association between maternal distress and child externalizing problems than internalizing problems reflects this, as well as aligning with findings from a recent cross-sectional study. We speculate that internalizing problems may not manifest outwardly as externalizing problems do and thus contribute less to mothers’ perceptions of their homes as chaotic. Additionally, both maternal distress and chaos are related to increased negative parenting behaviors including physical punishment and inconsistent discipline, which can result in coercive cycles between parents and children, sustaining externalizing problems. We would expect disorder in the home to be higher when these negative cycles are more frequent. Moreover, we speculate that specific elements of home chaos may be pertinent for the association between maternal distress and externalizing problems. For example, noise has been linked to feelings of annoyance and stress in adults and to child behavior. We encourage further research to explore the differential role of specific chaos components using more comprehensive measures of household chaos than were available in MCS.
Our study has a number of strengths, not least the large, longitudinal sample, and prospective data, enabling our models to account for construct stability over time in our investigation of mutual-mediation processes. Yet, we also acknowledge limitations. Perhaps the most pertinent limitation is the sole use of maternal reports. Internalizing problems may be hard to detect and maternal reports are not optimal for their assessment (likely reflected in the low internal reliability for our measure). Moreover, there may be inflation of associations between variables due to rater and perceiver biases. However, of note, perceptions of chaos are seen as a function of both observed stimuli and individual differences in sensitivity; recent experimental findings that those with higher sensory sensitivity may be more influenced by household chaos suggest that these individual perspectives are important. Nevertheless, our research would be strengthened by replication and by including observations and multiple reporters. It is also acknowledged that household chaos is a complex and multifaceted construct, and the internal reliability of our measure was low. While this is common with scales of few items that aim to assess different aspects of a construct—and our items seem broadly to represent the scope of the original —we recognize that chaos is a construct that is more than the sum of its parts and that even the well-documented short form (six items) chaos scale may be in need of reconsideration. Another limitation is the use of global measures of parental psychological distress and child behavior, measured with a 5-year gap, to capture transactional links. Such an approach has been compared to “taking still photos of a dance” (Houben et al., 2015, p. 905), missing out on the dynamic interactions between parent and child. Finally, we acknowledge the relative homogeneity of the sample regards race and ethnicity, as well as household composition. Further research with more diverse samples is warranted to explore the generalizability of these results.
Our findings indicate that the home environment context, in terms of disorder, noise, and lack of calmness, has a role to play in the mutuality of parent–child interactions and may be of interest to practitioners working with families to support child behavioral problems. Indeed, there may be key questions to be asked of the different components of chaos in associations between parental distress and child outcomes, and we encourage future research. We also suggest that full longitudinal mutual-mediation models with measures at all time points and using different family member perspectives would help us better understand these mechanistic processes.
I think this is an important article in highlighting the complex interaction between mothers and children, household chaos and externalizing behavior. I think it is important to note the comment that children with internalizing problems may contribute less to household chaos. Their suggestions for future research also make sense.