The Effects of Crisis Parenting on Children.
The Metropolitan State College of Denver.
When you picture homelessness, do you imagine a person wandering the streets and sleeping under bridges? Homelessness goes beyond the street. The findings of an annual study done by the Colorado Department of Human Services on October 23, 2001 reports that families currently make up 65% of homeless people in Metro Denver. The percentage of homeless families is up from 50% in 1998 and 25% in 1989. The number of homeless children aged 12 and under is currently 3,522 (Kreck 2002). Most of these young homeless people do not wander the streets, nor do they sleep under bridges. In many cases, these youth come from poor homes and unstable living situations. Whether that is the family moving frequently, living in a shelter, or the youth shuttling between the homes of several different relatives and friends, homelessness is a usually a process, not an event. These transient living conditions create insecurity in the lives of youth. This insecurity can lead to maladaptive behaviors. Here, we can see that there is a connection between homelessness and maladaptive behaviors in children. .
Understanding that having a stable living situation is none of the most important needs of humans leads to the conclusion that parental behaviors associated with meeting the basic needs of housing can override normally occurring behaviors. In addition, their children are generally raised in extreme poverty by parents who are intensely stressed, and socially isolated due to their transient situation. These parents may have a hard time acknowledging their children's problems due to the overwhelming gravity of their own situation and often have no other coping mechanisms other than to resort to crisis-type parenting. .
Ecological Perspective.
Bronfenbrenner (as cited in Corapci and Wachs, 2002) stated, "In the early years of life, the home environment is the principal system in which the child's social and cognitive development takes place.