Community development strategies to strengthen families

How can community development strategies impact family well-being?

Financial security is essential to family well-being. ¹

Financial instability can create material hardship, increasing the likelihood of families having trouble paying for essentials like rent, utilities, medical care, and adequate nutrition. It can also cause higher levels of stress for low-income families, leading to higher rates of divorce or separation and negatively impacting parent-child relationships.

Children in financially secure families tend to experience better academic and social outcomes. ²

Experiencing material hardship negatively affects children’s social-emotional, cognitive, and academic outcomes. Young children are more affected by experiencing material hardship than other age groups. Children from low-income families are more likely to fail courses, experience grade retention, receive special education services, drop out of high school, and experience poor health outcomes as adults.

Access to adequate nutrition is critical for children’s development. ³

Children who experience food insecurity have higher rates of school absenteeism, are more than twice as likely to repeat a grade in elementary school, have lower reading and math scores by third grade, and more likely to experience negative health outcomes.

Family assets create a “psychological buffer” from economic instability. ⁴

During an economically stressful event (like losing a job), the possession of assets has been shown to reduce the sense of family strain and mediate the experience of toxic stress.