The impacts of poverty on children’s social, emotional and behavioural outcomes.

About the research

Our research programme examines the effects of poverty on children’s social, emotional and behavioural outcomes, and on maternal mental health. It interrogates how children and families are affected by public policy by delving into the interconnected dynamics of poverty, parental employment, and family mental health using data from Growing Up in Scotland (GUS), a nationally representative longitudinal study of c.5,000 children. We implemented a series of statistical methods to understand the longitudinal trajectories of poverty, work intensity, children’s and parents’ mental health, as well as their interrelationships. We show that unstable work and poverty trajectories significantly impact the trajectories of conduct and emotional problems in children. We also found strong evidence that parental, and children’s mental health are intricately related over time. Structural inequalities, particularly the profound influence of poverty, cast a long shadow, intensifying mental health problems for both parents and children. Our findings have direct implications for policy and research, emphasising the need for a contextualised whole-family approach to mental health.

Key messages

Children and young people do not exist in isolation; they are members of families and are directly and indirectly affected by their prevailing economic conditions and structural inequalities.
Experiencing poverty has detrimental effects on parental and child mental health.
Parental mental health and child mental health are closely linked, influence each other and their relationship changes over time.

The challenge

The challenge our work aimed to address was the identification and understanding of the multifaceted factors influencing outcomes during childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, particularly focusing on the detrimental effects of poor mental health and low income. We highlight how these challenges stem from social inequalities arising earlier in life (during childhood), such as poverty, health disparities, inadequate housing, and discrimination.

We aim to highlight the importance of social factors in mitigating these disparities, emphasising access to essential services like education as a crucial protection factor. Ultimately, our goal is to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities surrounding social inequalities and their impact on developmental and later life outcomes, in the hopes of informing public policy strategies for addressing these challenges effectively.

The approach

Whenever possible, we make use of the full complexity of the data and apply statistical methods that match that complexity as far as reasonably possible. We have applied a variety of methods that include: structural equations, multilevel modelling, longitudinal models, latent class analysis and mixture modelling, etc. We have endeavoured to be as transparent as possible in the procedures we have undertaken, making available our full statistical code for the derived variables and models.

Our papers are highly innovative in the use of methods. They use a variety of principled statistical approaches: to check for longitudinal invariance; to derive variables that indicate membership to groups based on longitudinal patterns; to fit complex longitudinal models, etc.

Our paper Poverty, parental work intensity and child emotional and conduct problems uses multiple statistical methods to unveil the relationships between experiences of poverty, parental work intensity and children’s wellbeing over time. The methodological aspects of this research are discussed at length in Methods for analysing the relationship between poverty, parental work intensity, child emotional symptoms and conduct problems over time.

Furthermore, some of the methods used there are also used in The Indivisibility of Parental and Child Mental Health and Why Poverty Matters.

For the methods that are new to our more recent paper, there is a lengthy supplement with the statistical code and more details about the methods.

Data used from the UK Data Service collection

Growing up in Scotland, special licence. GN 33437 (waves 1-9)

The methods applied to the papers mentioned above were only possible because of the richness of the GUS data.

Research findings

Key insights generated by the research include:

Family composition, e.g. lone parenthood, is less important than the poverty and social isolation lone parenthood can bring.
- It is not lone parenthood that is associated with poorer outcomes in children but the impoverished socio-economic circumstances and area-level deprivation (neighbourhoods and communities) that lone parents inhabit due to public policy decisions.
- child social, emotional and behavioural wellbeing is pliable and can be improved by closeness and support from others.
- Policies that support the wellbeing and maintenance of social connections and relationships may be of benefit to families.
Wider financial vulnerability, such as debt, job insecurity, and material and area-based deprivation, have adverse impacts on children and mothers’ emotional and mental health, over and above the negative effects of income poverty:
- Children whose parents’ jobs deteriorated over time had increased emotional problems as they reached adolescence, compared to children of parents with stable jobs.
- Poverty and low-quality jobs affect in/directly children wellbeing in two ways. Firstly, they limit parents’ capacity to invest on their child’s development, and secondly they reduce parents’ emotional health via the stress brought on by low income.
Persistent poverty has the strongest effect across all outcomes. However, any experience of poverty has detrimental effects on parental and child mental health.
- It is worth noting that children living in poverty have poorer educational outcomes not because they have less ability or because they do not value education but because the structures and processes of education are intrinsically alienating to children living in poverty and to their parents.
We need to adopt a contextualised whole-family approach to poverty eradication approaches, our research and child and family mental health interventions.

Recommendations for policy

Children’s and parents’ wellbeing is an interdependent process that needs to be addressed in policy.
Interventions that attempt to address mental health in children need to also consider:
- Mental health of parents. To foster children’s wellbeing, we also need to foster parents’ wellbeing and a whole family approach both to poverty and mental health support is required to provide a holistic response that accounts for the indivisibility of parental and child mental health.
- How to tackle issues associated with poverty as it impacts mental health on the whole family (or household). Children do not live in isolation, but as members of families whose economic circumstances affect them both directly and indirectly. Often, policy and practice on child poverty focus on the child outside the home, often within school or wider community settings. While effort to mitigate the effects of poverty on children’s outcomes in the school and community is valuable and necessary, our findings strongly suggest that a major key to tackling poor mental health in parents and children is to tackle poverty and to prevent long periods of time spent living in poverty. This is more important for children as any length of time spent living in poverty is a significant portion of their childhood. Unless the poverty of the family is tackled, then the financial pressures in the home that negatively impact on parental mental health will continue to exert negative pressures on children’s mental health and wellbeing.

The impact

This work builds on a significant body of related research, led by Treanor, focussing on child poverty, family and child wellbeing and mental health. Examples of the impact that that research has had are:

Influencing Scottish government legislation

Treanor’s research was instrumental to the strengthening of the Child Poverty Act (Scotland) 2017 by ensuring the inclusion of priority groups and areas such as lone parents, education and income maximisation. Income maximisation comprises benefits advice delivered through statutory services, e.g. health, to ensure everyone is claiming their full entitlement.

Treanor’s longitudinal qualitative research with families influenced the Scottish Government decision to introduce an income supplement of £10 per week per child for low-income families, announced in the ‘Tackling child poverty delivery plan 2018-2022’, from December 2020. This is expected to reach over 400,000 children in Scotland, lifting 30,000 children out of relative poverty. John Dickie, Director of CPAG Scotland writes:

“The experience of parents living in poverty reflected in your research has directly informed CPAG’s involvement in the Give Me Five campaign to top-up child benefit in Scotland by £5 a week. Although the Scottish Government has not committed to such a top-up they have committed to introduce an income supplement for low income families by 2022.” John Dickie, CPAG.

Treanor’s research further influenced the inclusion of interim child poverty targets to measure and monitor progress in the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act. Bruce Adamson, Children & Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, says:

“Her evidence and work with key MSPs during the passage of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Bill helped to ensure significant amendments at Stage 2, not least around interim targets and income maximisation. This ultimately led to a more ambitious Act.“

Changing authority policy and practice

Edinburgh’s schools’ poverty-proofing programme, ‘1 in 5: Raising Awareness of Child Poverty in Edinburgh’ prioritises staff training and wider school engagement, e.g. with parents, to ensure that schools develop a sound understanding of the scale, impact and stigmatising myths which surround poverty. Treanor’s research was extensively used in the development of the programme and in the training offered to schools. As of September 2018, the 1 in 5 training had taken place with staff teams in over 70 schools across Edinburgh. Treanor also helped to create a guide for schools on poverty proofing called the Pupil Equity Framework, which is used, by 140+ schools in Edinburgh. Treanor’s research was synthesised and distributed to local authorities across Scotland as a report to guide action to prevent and mitigate child poverty locally. This has led to systemic and cultural change and enhanced policy and practice for securing poverty alleviation in local authorities. South Ayrshire council has, for example:

developed a ‘Financial Inclusion Pathway’ to money advice, which has assisted customers to manage debt totalling £1,362,502 and generated £3,079,233 in benefit uptake through its welfare and benefits advice (income maximisation). It has also helped customers to appeal against DWP decisions which has generated £561,000 for families locally;
provided 22,752 lunches during school holidays for children in the time frame 2017-19; and
provided breakfast clubs in local primary schools. In August 2018, it was estimated that a minimum of 766 young people used these breakfast clubs in South Ayrshire every week.

Implementation of training for practitioners and delivery of professional services

Treanor’s engagement with practitioners and professionals has led to changes in professional practice. It led to the development of a ‘Child poverty, health and wellbeing’ eLearning module for use in the initial education of healthcare workers. Treanor’s involvement encouraged NHS Health Scotland to include education professionals into their work on child poverty. Furthermore, Treanor’s research has helped to develop income maximisation in other health settings. Kerry McKenzie, Organisational Lead – Child Poverty, NHS Health Scotland writes:

“I have referred to Dr Treanor’s papers on financial vulnerability and financial inclusion in our work on financial inclusion in the early years, in particular the role of advice in NHS settings. There is an action in the Scottish Government’s Child Poverty Delivery Plan on supporting the development of financial inclusion referral pathways between the NHS and advice services which is directly linked to this work.”

Treanor’s research with educational professionals has resulted in a film used by Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, to educate teachers on the costs of schooling and the barriers to full participation in education for children and their parents living in poverty. This research directly led to the introduction of a minimum school clothing grant of GBP100.00 for children living in poverty in Scotland. John Dickie, Director of CPAG Scotland writes:

“the film produced in partnership with EIS which was used by CPAG to campaign for a minimum school clothing grant for Scotland in partnership with OPFS and the Poverty Truth Commission. The campaign was successful and the Scottish Government has since gone on to commit to the introduction of a national minimum grant.”

More recently, following the 2022/23 papers, Treanor and Troncoso have disseminated their findings at academic conferences and the wider public. They have engaged with NESTA (an independent charity that works to increase the innovation capacity of the UK) in stakeholder meetings. They have also met with The Counselling Services (TCS) group, who provide mental health services for school-age children and young people in various councils in Scotland. TCS representatives have noted that our papers using the “contextualised whole-family approach” framework has sparked their interest in developing new practices that can help address wider issues surrounding mental health in the family and not just the children and young people that are referred to them.

The impact of the most recent papers will hopefully start to unfold later. In the meantime, we continue working closely with the Scottish Government in our research using administrative data from Education, Health and the Census to understand longitudinal associations between educational trajectories and outcomes, individual and structural factors, mental health and familial socioeconomic circumstances.

Read the research

Treanor, M., Troncoso, P. (2023). The Indivisibility of Parental and Child Mental Health and Why Poverty Matters. Journal of Adolescent Health, 73(3), 470-477. (paper 3)

Treanor, M., Troncoso, P. (2022). Poverty, parental work intensity and child emotional and conduct problems. Social Science and Medicine, 312, [115373].

Troncoso, P., Treanor, M. (2023). Methods for analysing the relationship between poverty, parental work intensity, child emotional symptoms and conduct problems over time. MethodsX, 10, [101940].

Treanor, Morag C. (2020) Child poverty: aspiring to survive, Policy Press: Bristol.

Treanor, M. (2016) The effects of financial vulnerability and mothers’ emotional distress on child social, emotional and behavioural wellbeing: a structural equation model, Sociology, Vol 50, Issue 4, pp. 673–694

Treanor, Morag C. (2016) Social assets, low income and child social and emotional and behavioural wellbeing, Journal of Families, Relationships and Societies, Vol 5, (2), pp. 209-228.

Treanor, Morag C. (2014) Deprived or not deprived? Comparing the measured extent of material deprivation using the UK government’s and the Poverty and Social Exclusion surveys’ method of calculating material deprivation, Quality & Quantity, Vol. 48 (3):1337-1346.

Skafida, V & Treanor, M (2014) Do changes in objective and subjective family income predict change in children’s diets over time? Unique insights using a longitudinal cohort study and fixed effects analysis, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Vol. 68 (6): 534-41.

Research funding and partners

Our work has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council through the following grants: (1) Understanding Children’s Lives and Outcomes; (2) Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research; and (3) University of Edinburgh 2022–2026 ADR U.K. Program (grant numbers ES/V011243/1, ES/S007407/1, and ES/W010321/1, respectively).

MT and PT are affiliated with the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR), which is part of the Administrative Data Research U.K. partnership, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

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