Does poverty moderate within-family relations between children’s and parents’ mental health?

Abstract Children from lower income backgrounds are more vulnerable to psychopathology but it is unclear why. One possibility is that poverty amplifies the effects of other risk factors, such as parental distress, on child mental health problems. Previous relevant studies often had cross-sectional designs or relied on traditional cross-lagged panel designs, which have methodological drawbacks. Designs that disentangle within- and between-family effects can provide more robust conclusions. To date, no studies have investigated the moderating role of poverty on the relationship between parental and child mental health using a within-family design. This study investigates whether the between-and within-family relations between parental and child mental health differ between people living in poverty and those living in non-poverty. Multigroup autoregressive latent trajectory models with structured residuals were fitted to analyse data collected at ages 3, 5, 7, 11, 14, and 17 from the Millennium Cohort Study; a representative sample of the UK population ( N = 10, 309; ~ % 32 poverty). Results indicated that relations between parental distress and child psychopathology were not moderated by poverty at either the between or within-family levels. This study challenges models that indicate effects will be stronger in the context of poverty, such as the Context of Stress model. Thus, findings suggest that policymakers should prioritize addressing associations between parental and child mental health problems across all poverty levels.