Where You Live May Influence Your and Your Baby’s Behavior

How rural and urban families compare in maternal-infant wellbeing.

Research across decades and multiple disciplines has made it clear that the forces which shape early human development are far more complex than “nature” or “nurture.”

For example, it has come to light that as children, our individual characteristics and behaviors interact with those of other people in our lives, as well as broader contextual forces, to shape patterns of social and emotional behavior. These patterns set the stage for further development and continue to influence who we are, and how we interact with the world around us, into adolescence and beyond.

Infancy is a critical period for social and emotional development. According to Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model¹, infant temperament (emotional response style that forms the basis of our personalities), the way parents interact with their children, and environmental factors come together to shape child outcomes. In fact, recent research suggests that macro-level environmental variables—such as geographic location, local or regional norms for parenting behavior, or connectedness of a family to sources of social support—may be more important determinants of child development than psychologists previously thought. Just as infant temperament influences parental responses (picture spending most of your time with a calm baby versus a very fussy one), caregiver behavior also plays an important role in shaping infant temperament development in the first year of life.

How might geographic location, and related macro-level contextual variables, affect family dynamics and infant development?

Colleagues in the Gartstein Temperament Laboratory and I conducted a study², recently published in the Journal of Community Psychology, to learn more about the differences between families of infants living in urban and rural areas. A previous study³ showed that urban caregivers were more sensitive/responsive to their infants, meaning they were more attuned to the children's needs and wants, yet temperament characteristics had never been compared across rural and urban babies. Likewise, parental stress had not been compared for rural and urban families beyond general economic burden and parental mental health diagnoses, more common in rural communities. We wondered how factors such as social isolation, remoteness, ideologies about individualism and self-sufficiency, and limited access to supportive resources (not to mention concerns about confidentiality when seeking help in very small communities) may play a role.

So, we examined parent-child interactions, infant temperament, and parenting stress in rural and urban samples similar in terms of socioeconomic status and racial/ethnic breakdown. Our rural data were collected in the counties containing two Inland Northwest towns on the border of Washington and Idaho, and the urban sample came from the metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area.

Infants’ temperamental profiles were assessed by asking mothers to rate the frequency of 191 specific behaviors and emotional expressions, which were then clustered into three overarching factors: negative and positive emotionality, as well as self-regulatory tendencies (for example, self-soothing). Because less-sensitive parenting is linked with more-frequent negative infant emotional expressions (such as fear, anger, and other types of distress), we predicted rural mothers would rate their infants higher in terms of emotional distress than their urban counterparts. Parent-infant interactions were examined by coding mothers’ behavior in video-recorded play sessions.

Sure enough, our findings coincided with previous research³. Mothers in our urban sample demonstrated more sensitive parenting behavior than rural mothers at a level determined to be statistically significant. In addition, urban mothers tended to facilitate turn-taking in their interactions with infants—a pattern of parental behavior associated with more secure attachment. And rural infants were rated as more frequently displaying negative emotions, including significantly more distress when faced with limitations (e.g., caregiver taking something away).

Whereas we predicted that rural parents would report greater parenting stress, this outcome did not differ between urban and rural mothers.

Although socioeconomic status is traditionally indicated as a key difference in rural and urban populations, our results suggest other factors (e.g., isolation, access to resources such as mental health services) warrant further exploration with respect to rural family dynamics. Urban and rural settings likely pose different, but functionally equivalent, stressors that can influence parenting.

Mothers in our rural sample were also significantly younger (average age of 29) than the urban mothers (36 on average), suggesting that childbearing age—and associated variables like emotional maturity, education, life experience, acquired wealth, and stability of the co-parent relationship—may very well account for some of the differences we observed.

It is important to understand the limits of generalizability for the findings of our study, which did not distinguish subtypes of urban and rural regions (e.g., suburban, inner‐city) that are sure to pose different types and levels of risk to growing families. Better metrics for classifying residence in various geographic areas could help us gain a clearer picture of how our local environments affect family lives—and what is really going on inside more-rural or more-urban households.

Ultimately, we must emphasize that research results are not deterministic. That is, our findings do not mean that families should avoid moving to the country or that rural living causes insensitive parenting or distress-prone infants. Rather, knowing what potential risks to consider may help parents make informed decisions surrounding caregiving and parent-child interactions.

For now, whether it is seeking out extra support in the form of postpartum parent groups or social media forums, obtaining professional psychotherapy or other home-based services, or working to adopt more mindful parenting practices, rural parents in particular may benefit from ensuring adequate support for themselves, especially when caring for an infant.