Disruptive Child Behavior and Income Inequality: Examining Long-term Maintenance of Family Income Levels in Families Receiving Parent-Training

Abstract

This study explores long-term maintenance of family income levels in families receiving parent training for disruptive child behaviors. We use data from the Danish implementation of the Incredible Years Parent training (IYPT) across 21 municipalities from 2012 to 2019. Utilizing a quasi-experimental design with matching of a subsample of 707 out of the 1229 families from the Danish IYPT sample with 690 control families drawn from the national registers, we compare annual disposable family income in intervention families with the background population and control families from 2 years before to 4 years after pretest. Our findings reveal that intervention families and control families had significantly lower annual disposable family income than the background population families across all time points. For intervention families, the financial gap from the background population families widened from USD 11,268 to USD 16,694 from the first to the last time point. Adjusted regressions comparing intervention families to control families found a small but significant financial gap, so that intervention families had USD 2189 less to their disposal per year from the first time point and USD 7596 less per year at the last time point. These results suggest that intervention families faced increasing financial strain from years before up to 4 years following the IYPT, both in relation to the general Danish population and to the matched control of socioeconomically similar families across an 8-year span. We suggest that this could reflect continued stress and disruption of work schedule due to child behavior problems. Regardless of the underlying mechanism, these findings underscore the importance of considering the long-term economic contexts of families with disruptive child behaviors. Societal strategies that address both parenting challenges and broader contextual inequalities may be needed to support healthy child development.

Keywords: Contextual inequality; Disruptive child behavior; Family income; Long-term effects; Parent training; Quasi-experimental study.

Fig. 1

Mean annual disposable family income in intervention, control, and background population families across 8 years