Mother-Father Relationship as a Family Asset: Pathways to Parenting Processes and to Children's Social-Emotional Development

• In Event: Effects of Family Support and Interactions on Young Children

Abstract

High-quality mother-father relationships serve as potential levers that can strengthen parenting processes and promote children’s well-being. Guided by family systems theory, we conducted a path analysis to investigate the mechanisms through which mother-father relationships influence children’s growth in social-emotional skills directly and indirectly via parenting stress and parental engagement. We found that both coparenting and romantic dimensions of the mother-father relationship were negatively associated with parenting stress, and positively associated with parental engagement. Also, mother-perceived better romantic relationship was associated with children’s gains in adaptive social skills and decreases in internalizing and externalizing problems, in part through its mediated influence on maternal parenting stress. These findings highlight the benefits of high-quality interparental relationship for parenting and children’s social-emotional development.

Authors

• Yujin Lee, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• kyungmin kim, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Songtian Zeng, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Anne Douglass, University of Massachusetts - Boston