Inter-Parental Relationship Quality Moderates the Link between Mothers’ Anger Proneness and Power-Assertive Control

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

The broadly accepted ecological approach (Belsky, 1984; Taraban & Shaw, 2017) emphasizes that parenting is best understood in the context of the interplay of multiple factors, including parental traits and the quality of the inter-parental relationship. A large literature has documented that marital discord is detrimental to parenting, known as “spillover effects”. Parents whose relationships are acrimonious are more likely to resort to power-assertive discipline when interacting with their children, compared to parents in harmonious relationships. It is, however, unclear how parents’ personalities, another important component of the childrearing environment in ecological perspectives (Belsky & Barends, 2002), interface with qualities of the inter-parental relationship in the process of parenting.

We examined whether inter-parental relationship moderates associations between parents’ anger proneness and their reliance on power-assertive discipline toward their toddlers. Children and Parents Study (CAPS) followed 200 community families (mothers, fathers, and infants, with all data parallel for mother- and father-child dyads) from infancy into toddlerhood. When the infants were 7-9 months, parents reported their anger proneness using the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992) and described the quality of their relationship using the Quality of Marriage Index (Norton, 1983). At 15-17 months, we observed mothers’ and fathers’ discipline during a laboratory session in a naturalistic, carefully scripted 10-min cleanup task. The parent asked the child to put away toys after play, but refrained from helping the child. Observers rated parental control for each 30-sec segment on the dimension of power assertion as 1 (no control), 2 (gentle control), 3 (firm control), or 4 (power-assertive, harsh control). A composite was created for each parent.

Multiple regression analyses revealed a main effect of anger proneness on parental power-assertive control for both mothers, F(1,187) = 4.44, p < .05, B = 0.21, SE = 0.10, 95% CI [0.01, 0.41] and fathers, F(1,181) = 6.25, p < .05, B = 0.35, SE = 0.14, 95% CI [0.07, 0.62]). For mothers, results supported the significant interaction effect between anger proneness and the quality of inter-parental relationship, F(1,187) = 4.35, p < .05, B = -0.25, SE = 0.12, 95% CI [-0.48, -0.01], which qualified the main effect. Simple slopes revealed that anger proneness was associated positively with observed power assertion among mothers who reported relatively poor relationship (16th percentile) with the children’s fathers (B = 0.41, SE = 0.15, p < .01), but not among mothers who reported moderate or high quality of that relationship (50th and 84th percentile). There was no significant interaction effect for fathers’ power-assertive control.

The strengths of this work include a short-term longitudinal design, a large sample, a multi-method approach, and parallel data from mother- and father-child dyads. Consistent with ecological models, mothers’ personality trait – anger proneness – influenced their discipline styles, but only in the context of a relatively less satisfying inter-parental relationship. Finding that mother-father relationship can either attenuate or elevate the impact of maladaptive personality traits on parents’ behavior with their young children has implications for research in developmental psychology and psychopathology, and research on family processes.

Authors

• Neevetha Sivagurunathan, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Danming An, Lehigh University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicole C. Yeager, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robin J Campbell, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Grazyna Kochanska, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author