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The Family Stress Model (FSM) grew out of research efforts to understand how economic disadvantage impacts family processes. Researchers like Reuben Hill, an American sociologist, were interested in how the 1930s Great Depression contributed to economic and family stress at that time. Years later, Rand D. Conger and colleagues proposed the FSM from their work with rural families in Iowa to better understand how economic disadvantage effects child and adolescent outcomes through family processes.

Overall, the FSM posits that economic disadvantage creates economic pressure for caregivers, which in turn has a detrimental effect on their personal mental health. These negative mental health effects then impact both their parenting practices and increase the chances of interpersonal conflict within caregivers in the family, all of which, affects the well-being of children and adolescents. Research has extended and tested the model across different populations by understanding the effects in childhood, adolescence, and over time, thinking beyond the two biological parent family structure, assessing risk and protective factors that mediate multiple links, and considering the role of culture, race, and ethnicity.

Conger's Original Family Stress Model

Conger and colleagues proposed the theoretical model for the FSM which linked adverse economic conditions with adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems through family conflict and coercion. The theoretical underpinnings for this model included Leonard Berkowitz’s work in 1989 which outlined how stress and other painful conditions (i.e., economic pressure) are related to an increased emotional arousal or negative affect that varies from despondency to anger (i.e., family conflict and coercion). From this, Conger and colleagues proposed that adverse economic conditions would be associated with economic pressure. Economic pressure would then be directly associated with parent-adolescent financial conflict which, in turn, would be associated with adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. They also predicted that economic pressure would be indirectly associated with marital conflict through an increase in parent depressed mood. Further, they predicted marital conflict would be then directly associated with parent hostility to adolescent which, in turn, would be associated with adolescent internalizing and externalizing behaviors. They also predicted marital conflict would be indirectly associated with parent hostility to adolescent through parent-adolescent financial conflict to then, once again, be associated with adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms.

In their early work, Conger and colleagues focused on rural Midwestern families who were experiencing a detrimental economic decline since the 1980s and into the 1990s when Conger and colleagues completed their early research on the FSM. The final sample in their 1994 study included 378 two-parent White families in eight different agricultural and rural Midwest counties who were interviewed for three years starting 1989. The adolescents in the study were seventh graders, 198 girls and 180 boys, and had a sibling within four years of their age. Each year, the families were visited twice by a trained interviewer in their home for about two hours. Across the two visits, both parents and the adolescent completed a set of questionnaires and participated in several different structured interaction tasks that were videotaped and later coded to capture observer-reported parental depressed mood, marital conflict, and parent hostility.

Overall, Conger and colleagues found that adverse economic conditions were associated with family economic pressure. They also found that economic pressure was associated with parent-adolescent financial conflict, as they predicted, but parent-adolescent financial conflict was not directly associated with adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Rather, parent-adolescent financial conflict was associated with parent hostility to adolescent which, in turn, was associated with adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. They also unexpectedly found that parent depressed mood was directly associated with parent-adolescent financial conflict. As predicted, economic pressure was indirectly associated with marital conflict through parent depressed mood. Marital conflict was then associated with both parent-adolescent financial conflict and parent hostility to adolescent. Once again, it was only parent hostility to adolescent that was associated with adolescent symptoms. Additionally, they did not find evidence of fathers being more affected by economic pressure than mothers and they also did not find gender differences in internalizing and externalizing symptoms across adolescent boys and girls. While this study was instrumental in demonstrating preliminary evidence for the FSM, future research expanded on the FSM to provide stronger longitudinal evidence.

Expanding the Family Stress Model

Since it was first proposed, the FSM had been expanded in several ways by testing: other forms of economic disadvantage and pressure, different forms of caregiver psychology distress beyond depression, interpersonal conflict among caregivers beyond the two biological parent structure, different forms of parenting practices, child and adolescent outcomes beyond internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and finally, risk and protective factors with main and mediating effects at different points of the model. Additionally, there was a push to test the FSM with racially and ethnically diverse families and include culturally relevant factors in the model. However, the key framework of the FSM continues to be that economic disadvantage and pressure predict negative child and adolescent outcomes over time through caregivers’ psychological distress, interpersonal conflict among caregivers, and disrupted parenting with additional risk and protective factors exacerbating and mitigating these links.

Economic Disadvantage and Pressure

While Family Stress Theory, more broadly, focuses on different sources of stress (e.g., war, divorce or separation, natural disasters) and their impact on families, Conger and colleagues have focused most of their work on economic disadvantage as the source of stress. Economic disadvantage, also referenced as economic hardship or adverse economic conditions, have been defined in distinct ways across research studies. In Conger and colleagues’ 1994 paper, which first proposed FSM, they conceptualized economic disadvantage as family income considerate of household size, as well as experiencing unstable work, trouble at work (e.g., demotions), being laid off, other involuntary losses of work, and debt-to-asset ratio. Since then, economic disadvantage has also been measured with other income-based methods, including living in poverty, or having an annual family income below the federal guidelines and income-needs ratio. Economic disadvantage has also been extended to consider the two other aspects of socioeconomic status, in addition to income, which are parental education and occupation. Unlike income, parental education and income tend to be more consistent. At the same time, socioeconomic status provides further evidence of the family’s resources.

There has also been a push to understand how economic disadvantage affects caregiver and parent perceived financial strain, including family economic pressure. In the 1994 paper, Conger and colleagues measured this by asking parents three sets of questions: one, how difficult it was to make ends meet, two, if they had access to resources (i.e., home, clothing, household items, a car, food, medical care, and recreational activities), and three, if they had to make any economic changes to adjust to their financial difficulties, such as cutting back financially. Although some researchers argue that economic pressure is a subjective measure of economic disadvantage, Conger and colleagues argued that measures of economic pressure can also be objective or measurable outcomes (e.g., making financial adjustments due to difficulties). Regardless, research has shown that economic disadvantage is tied economic pressure among White or European American, African American, non-White Hispanic or Latino, and Asian American families living in the United States.

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