# Early socioeconomic conditions to children’s trait resilience: longitudinal mediation effects of mothers’ and fathers’ parenting

## TL;DR

This study shows how early financial hardship affects children's resilience through parenting behaviors in Singaporean families.

## Contribution

The study provides new evidence on how parenting mediates the impact of socioeconomic status on children's resilience in an Asian context.

## Key findings

- Lower socioeconomic status is linked to reduced trait resilience in children.
- Maternal and paternal rejection mediate the effect of education on children's resilience.
- Lower maternal warmth explains the link between household income and children's resilience.

## Abstract

Trait resilience is a well-established protective factor against diverse social-emotional challenges and stress-associated psychiatric disorders. Its cultivation may thus be exceptionally critical for children exposed to early financial adversity, which has been demonstrated to confer elevated vulnerabilities to psychosocial maladjustment. Grounded in the Family Stress Model with a focus on an understudied Asian population, this longitudinal study investigates how early family socioeconomic disadvantage indirectly shapes children’s trait resilience through key parenting dimensions—warmth, rejection, and autonomy support—by both mothers and fathers.

This longitudinal study was embedded in a multi-ethnic, pre-birth cohort involving Singaporean families (57.3% Chinese, 30.0% Malay, 12.7% Indian), comprising 430 biological mothers (MAge = 30.5, SDAge = 5.13), 430 children (47.9% female), and 348 biological fathers (MAge = 33.9, SDAge = 6.03). Key family socioeconomic characteristics were measured at baseline during the 11th week of pregnancy via maternal report (maternal education, household income, and housing type), and at 2 or 3 years postnatal via paternal report (paternal education). Children reported on mothers’ and fathers’ parenting practices (warmth, rejection, and autonomy support) separately at 8.5 years with the Parental Bonding Instrument, and trait resilience at 10.5 years with the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-25.

Children from families with lower socioeconomic status during early childhood (indexed by lower levels of mothers’ and fathers’ educational attainment, and household income) demonstrated lower trait resilience in late childhood. Parallel mediation analyses with 5,000 bootstrapped samples revealed that maternal and paternal educational attainment influenced trait resilience in late childhood via greater maternal and paternal rejection during middle childhood, respectively. Meanwhile, the relationship of household income with children’s trait resilience was mediated by lower levels of maternal warmth only. No significant indirect effects of both parents’ autonomy support were observed.

Maternal and paternal parenting practices play salient roles in nurturing children’s trait resilience, in part substantiating the cultural validity of the Family Stress Model within a Southeast Asian family ecology. Specifically, family interventions could seek to ameliorate both maternal and paternal rejection, as well as enhance maternal warmth behaviors to mitigate the influence of socioeconomic disadvantage on children’s trait resilience.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13034-025-00979-1.