Families are a key social determinant of mental health across the life course. However, sociologists importantly note that families themselves are embedded within broader social structures that shape how, when, and why families matter. As medical and family sociologists, we work from a stress process and life course perspective to understand these social realities. Specifically, we recognize that many mental health outcomes are a product of interactions between exposure and vulnerability to stressors and coping resources that are then linked to well-being across familial relationships. Within this perspective, families are types of social environments that may buffer against external stressors in ways that improve mental health, but families may also be sites of stress and are also not exempt from the influences of external stressors that damage mental health. Specifically, families act as mechanisms through which social structures impact mental health.
We present two examples of how families are important for mental health patterns: (1) Brantley writing about her research considering families and mental health in the context of racism, and (2) Thomeer writing about her research on families and mental health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In these examples, we highlight the diverse pathways through which families matter for mental health while recognizing the multiple structural forces that shape both families and mental health across social positions and over the life course.
Families, Racism, and Mental Health (Brantley)
Parents are generally held responsible for teaching their children several life skills. However, because of the historical and contemporary implications of being racialized as Black within the United States, Black families specifically have long been a source of information and protection. Black children are often taught about race and racism at young ages–i.e., racial socialization. This process consists of specific language and tools to assist children in navigating a society in which anti-Black racism is embedded and may potentially lead to emotional or mental detriment and even physical harm. Although prior research has found that racial socialization benefits Black children in a multitude of ways, these same benefits are likely not translated to the parents doing this work.
In my current study exploring Black mothers’ perceptions of the role of racial socialization in their mothering, I find that engaging in this racial socialization process may be a potential pathway for parenting stress that mothers identify as having a significant role in their perceived mental health. I interviewed Black mothers with children from adolescence to adulthood to gain insight into how Black women are performing this racial socialization over their children’s lives. Overwhelmingly, mothers emphasized a number of tools and strategies they utilize to protect and empower their children, such as delaying milestones and teaching agency, which aligns with themes Dawn Marie Dow captured in her book, Mothering While Black (University of California Press 2019). For example, one research participant named Claire discussed how she delayed her son from obtaining his driver’s license because she feared he would face physical harm from police. Black mothers’ concern about police violence, particularly for sons, has been highlighted in recent work by Shannon Malone Gonzalez focusing on gender differences in “the talk” within Black families. Additionally, another mother, Sandra, described a time when her daughter’s classmates negatively commented about her hair during class. This spurred Sandra to dedicate additional time and effort to complimenting her daughter’s hair frequently, making sure it was styled, and reminding her how her hair and overall beauty is rooted in her Black identity. Sandra’s efforts were rooted in ensuring her daughter’s self-esteem was not influenced by euro-centric beauty standards, which is a common racial socialization practice between Black mothers and daughters.
However, although mothers in the study recognized the necessity of these practices, they also described how enforcing these practices took a toll on their mental health. This revealed itself in both the exhaustion of enacting these tools—e.g., having to physically be around their children as much as possible, consistently checking in with children about treatment at school—and the concern and fear mothers felt due to their need for these tools. In both situations, racism infiltrates Black women’s motherhood and utilizes family life as a potential pathway for negative mental health outcomes. Specifically, mothers identified that their children’s experiences of racism, as well as the work mothers are doing to mitigate those experiences, serve a significant role in their mental health through feelings of anger, hopelessness, and worry, as well as experiencing crying spells and the inability to concentrate on tasks. Importantly, although family can be a pathway for racism to negatively influence mental health, it can also be a space to combat it.
Although racism is embedded in many social institutions that impede the well-being of Black families, inside the home has been one place where Black people, particularly mothers, have sought to regain a sense of control. The home as a site of resistance for Black mothers and families has been theorized as a unique aspect of Black women’s mothering that promotes the well-being of Black families. Mothers I interviewed in this qualitative study described how their homes are a place of “Black joy.” Although mothers identified that the social institutions their families are forced to come into contact with are “in fact racist” and harmful to the mental and emotional well-being of themselves and their children, their homes and family life were a place to escape. Therefore, although their children’s experiences of racism and their own need to utilize tools of racial socialization were identified as playing a role in the mothers’ anxiousness, sadness, and a number of other mental and emotional aspects of well-being, their homes created a place of calm to mitigate the role of this racism-related stress. Indeed, family for Black people, particularly mothers in this case, is both a pathway for racism-related stress to influence mental health, but it is also a space to benefit and protect mental health despite these social systems looking to destroy it.
Families and Mental Health in the Context of the Pandemic (Thomeer)
As a second example regarding how families matter for mental health, I draw attention to my research around mental health, families, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Due in part to policy decisions and specific public health recommendations, the family was especially salient for mental health during the beginning months of the pandemic, as people were encouraged (or in some national contexts, required) to stay home and have contact with only their own households. As schools, workplaces, recreational spaces, restaurants, and even “non-essential” medical facilities closed, the function of the average family expanded. As my analysis of the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) shows, this may have led to an environment that was particularly detrimental for the mental health of single adults, especially single parents who had many external demands without much support. As another study by Jace and Makridis indicates, income loss during the pandemic was less detrimental to the mental health of married people compared to single people, suggesting marriage may serve as a particularly important buffer against pandemic-related stressors. And in a working paper with Brantley and Rin Reczek analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth-97 before and during the pandemic, we show that being a single parent during the pandemic was associated with worsening mental health from work and school disruptions compared to being a partnered parent.
Yet a view of families as always positive for mental health during the pandemic and specific family structures (e.g., married households) as risk factors for poor mental health is an overly simplistic conclusion based on available research. As family scientists have repeatedly demonstrated, the benefits of family—particularly marriage—are not universal. In my analysis of the HPS, I found that marriage was associated with mental health benefits for men but not women during the pandemic. And a narrow focus on mental health benefits of families during the pandemic overlooks the mental health costs often tied to doing family work or having strained—and sometimes even violent—family relationships. The mental health costs of doing family work, such as caregiving for children or adult family members with health needs, were especially pronounced during the pandemic as children stayed home from school and nursing home care and other long-term care options were restricted. Additionally, the increased reliance on families, facilitated in part due to the closing of college dorms and increased housing instability, meant more contact with strained family members. For example, Jessica Fish and colleagues demonstrated the unique mental health strains experienced by LGBTQ youth when isolated with unsupportive family members during the early pandemic months. There was also an increase in family conflict more generally, partially due to more financial stressors.
As research conducted during the pandemic demonstrates, the importance of families for mental health is itself dependent on broader social structures and events—and the pandemic was not the only major event over the past few years. For racial/ethnic minoritized families, the period since 2020 has been called a “pandemic on a pandemic,” given the continued racism within the United States demonstrated by higher rates of COVID-19 mortality in the early months of the pandemic among Black and Hispanic communities, police violence against Black and Hispanic men with no meaningful governmental changes in response, rises in hate crimes for Asian and Hispanic communities, and generally higher rates of pandemic-related stressors for communities of color. My analysis of the HPS (with Myles Moody and Jenjira Yahirun) shows that these different stressors contributed to greater declines in mental health for Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities compared to White people in the early months of the pandemic. But Brantley’s research, discussed above, calls for us to zoom in and recognize how families are responding to these compounding experiences of racism and the mental health implications. More specifically, some mothers in Brantley’s qualitative study even expressed finding solace in having their children home during COVID-19 school closures because it allowed them to further protect their children and lessened the potential for them to have a racist experience. This matched the results of my ongoing research with Brantley and Reczek indicating that Black parents’ experience fewer mental health consequences from having children in remote school than White parents. Overall, these patterns link to a broader growing literature that cautions against seeing family structure as inherently or universally positive or negative for mental health, instead recognizing historical and contemporary processes and structures that contribute to different meanings of singleness, marriage, and other family statuses across groups and over time.
Conclusion
Together, these two examples demonstrate the need to recognize families as important for mental health, although how, when, and why families matter is highly dependent on the broader structural context and social environments. Families are themselves important social sites, characterized by a number of complex and diverse processes that can both harm and benefit mental health. Importantly, the social science is clear that specific family forms should not be recognized as inherently good or bad for mental health. This type of erroneous framing has contributed to stigmatization of many families, especially Black single mother families. Much more important than the structure of the family is the content of the family ties, the barriers the family is facing, and the resources the family has– with resources encompassing not just finances but also social support–which can assist in resisting harmful systems of inequality. These barriers and resources, notably, are partially dependent on social policies and contemporary and historical realities.
Ultimately, we argue that families have the capacity to be positive engines for mental health; however, this is undermined when specific family forms are privileged alongside the privileging of White families. Policies and organizational decisions that recognize and support a diversity of family types—including chosen family arrangements—would improve mental health and promote mental health equity.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.
