Child’s Illness and Social Support for Parents: An Empirical Analysis in an Eastern European Context

In the past two decades, Eastern Europe – particularly Poland, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria – witnessed numerous protests by parents of severely ill children and children with disabilities. The low levels of formal social support these families receive suggest that informal social support is particularly important in these countries compared with countries providing greater formal social support. Quantitative studies on the determinants of access to social support remain scarce, with studies mainly focusing on sociodemographic variables. Our study used data on 1,970 children aged five years or less and their parents, drawn from the 2019 Polish Health Interview Survey, and employed partial least squares path modelling to investigate the relationship between a child’s illness and the informal social support that parents perceive and to test the so-called network quality hypothesis. The analysis showed a strong negative relationship between a child’s illness and informal social support for parents in households with low socioeconomic status. The moderating (amplifying) effects of low equivalised household income and low educational attainment were significant for both fathers and mothers. The generally negative relationship between a child’s illness and informal social support for parents remained following the omission of the moderating effects and adjustment for parental health issues, age, educational attainment, and equivalised household income. The only significant difference between fathers and mothers was the non-positive association between age and informal social support, which was stronger for fathers and was likely attributable to men under-reporting their health issues. The relationship between a child’s illness and the informal social support perceived by parents was negatively moderated by low equivalised household income and low educational attainment, which is consistent with the network quality hypothesis. The generally negative relationship between a child’s illness and informal social support perceived by parents remained following the omission of the moderating effects and adjustment for parental health issues, age, educational attainment, and equivalised household income. The findings can be placed within a broader context. First, while this has rarely been generalised, empirical research has shown that groups experiencing disadvantage are more likely to report low informal social support. Second, the interchangeability of informal and formal social support suggests that recently proposed initiatives, such as mobile social inclusion advisory services, could alleviate the observed disadvantages experienced by parents of children with medical conditions.