Estrés parental y pobreza multidimensional en madres y padres chilenos

Introduction. Today, there is a greater awareness of society’s inequalities. This has led to extending the traditional concept of poverty and new, more comprehensive measurement methods, such as multidimensional poverty measurement. Nevertheless, despite the advances made, the proposal leaves out important relational aspects that need to be considered. Indeed, poverty can have severe effects on people’s lives, especially children, owing partly to the chronic stress that poverty can generate in caregivers. As a result, in this study, we sought to establish the relationship between socioeconomic status, as a traditional measure, and multidimensional poverty with parental stress. Methodology. A cross-sectional descriptive quantitative study was conducted. A sample of Chilean mothers and fathers (n=180) was selected through non-probability quota sampling. Participants answered questions about their socioeconomic situation and the presence or absence of deprivations linked to multidimensional poverty measurement and the reduced version of the Parental Stress Index (PSI-SF). Results. The results of the correlations and multiple linear regressions performed showed that parental stress tended to rise as the multidimensional poverty percentage increased. When multidimensional poverty interacted with gender, household type, and number of children, the model improved its goodness-of-fit, predicting a higher percentage of the parental stress score. As the percentage of multidimensional poverty increased, those with higher parental stress scores corresponded to female participants who did not live with their children and had three children, followed by female participants who lived in large two-parent households and had three children. The effect of high multidimensional poverty on parental stress was greater in female respondents belonging to large two-parent households with three children. Discussion. The results are discussed in relation to the importance of the findings and their relationship with other available scientific evidence. Conclusion. Multidimensional poverty is more strongly related to parental stress than socioeconomic status. In addition, the presence of other sociodemographic variables, especially household type and number of children, play a significant role in explaining this relationship.