POVERTY AND FAMILY STABILITY: EVIDENCE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE IN ALAGBADO AREA, LAGOS STATE

Poverty can destabilise family life not only through insufficient income but also through food insecurity, insecure housing, debt, limited access to health care and education, caregiver distress, conflict and disrupted parenting. This article examines the relationship between poverty and family stability and considers its implications for social work practice in Alagbado Area, Lagos State. A structured integrative review was undertaken using peer-reviewed studies and authoritative institutional reports published principally between 2014 and 2026. Searches covered PubMed and PubMed Central, African Journals Online, Google Scholar-indexed literature, ScienceDirect-indexed records and the repositories of the National Bureau of Statistics, the World Bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund. The six publications initially supplied to guide the study were screened alongside the wider evidence base and were not treated as the sole sources. Evidence was synthesised thematically through the Family Stress Model, ecological systems perspective and strengths and family-resilience perspective. The reviewed literature indicates that economic hardship is associated with economic pressure, caregiver psychological distress, couple conflict, weakened communication, role overload, inconsistent parenting and adverse child outcomes. Nigerian and Lagos evidence confirms substantial multidimensional deprivation, food insecurity, high urban living costs and vulnerability to economic shocks, but no eligible peer-reviewed study directly measured poverty and family stability among households in Alagbado. Consequently, wider findings are interpreted as contextually relevant propositions rather than local prevalence estimates. The article argues that social work in Alagbado should integrate material-needs assessment, psychosocial intervention, child safeguarding, family preservation, economic strengthening, community partnerships and policy advocacy. Community-based primary research remains necessary to establish the scale and specific forms of poverty-related family instability in Alagbado