Poster #151 - Relations Among Paternal Parenting Stress, Paternal Marital Satisfaction, Paternal Depression, and Children’s Anxiety/Depression

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Parenting stress has been shown to affect both spouses’ perceived marital quality and psychological well-being, and both paternal and maternal depressive symptoms influenced children’s behavior problems (Cummings, Cheung, Koss, & Davies, 2014). Specifically, paternal parenting stress was negatively corelated with their marital satisfaction (Kwan, Kwok, & Ling, 2015) and psychological well-being (Lavee, Sharlin, & Katz, 1996). In addition, when parents were dissatisfied with their marital relationships, their negative emotions and behaviors transferred to their children (Erel & Burman, 1995). While most of these studies have focused on mothers (Bronte-Tinkew et al., 2006), the present study instead investigates the relations among paternal parenting stress, marital satisfaction, depression, and children’s anxiety or depression. Specifically, the study analyzes data from a longitudinal research project, The Panel Study on Korean Children, which was collected in 2012. A total of 1,666 families with a four-year old child (851 boys, 815 girls; M age = 4 years, 5 months, SD = 1 month) participated. Four questionnaires were used in this study to gather data on paternal parenting stress, paternal marital satisfaction, paternal depression, and children’s anxiety/depression. Path analysis within structural equation modeling (SEM) in Mplus was utilized. First, there were significant direct effects (see Figure) from paternal parenting stress to marital satisfaction, from paternal marital satisfaction to paternal depression, from paternal depression to children’s anxiety/depression, from paternal parenting stress to paternal depression, and from that parenting stress to children’s anxiety/depression. Second, there were also significant indirect effects (see Table): from paternal parenting stress to children’s anxiety/depression, which was mediated by paternal depression only, as well as by both paternal marital satisfaction and depression; from paternal parenting stress to their depression, as mediated by their marital satisfaction; and from marital satisfaction to children’s anxiety/depression, as mediated by paternal depression. Third, several effects were only significant for boys: the indirect effects from paternal parenting stress to their depression to children’s anxiety/depression, those from paternal marital satisfaction to their depression to children’s anxiety/depression, and a serial mediation from paternal parenting stress to marital satisfaction to paternal depression to children’s anxiety/depression were significant only for boys. These main results imply that greater parenting stress predicts lower marital satisfaction among fathers, this lower marital satisfaction subsequently predicts higher levels of paternal depression, and finally this greater paternal depression predicts higher levels of children’s anxiety/depression. This emphasizes the importance of paternal psychological well-being in families, which plays a role in children’s psychological well-being. Also, the different results between father-son and father-daughter relationships offer support for a same-gender modeling hypothesis (Bandura, 1999; Eckes & Trautner, 2000; Underwood, Beron, Gentsch, Galperin, & Risser, 2008), and suggest that boys’ anxiety and depression may be related to boys perceiving or observing their father’s feelings more sensitively than girls. Investigating whether family income or parents’ educational level affects children’s mental health could improve future studies.

Authors

• Yookyung Lee, The University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kyongjoo Hong, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Sunyoung Park, California Lutheran University
  Non-Presenting Author