1-124 - Coparenting and Healthy Father-Child Relationships

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Evidence affirms the importance of fathers to young children’s socioemotional and cognitive development. However, fathers vary widely in the extent to which they are involved in different types of activities with their children and the quality of these father-child interactions. Critical to understanding these differences among fathers and determining how to foster healthy father-child relationships is consideration of the context in which fathering occurs. Scholars identify high-quality, mutually supportive coparenting relationships between fathers and their children’s mothers as key to providing a strong foundation for father-child relationships. The proposed symposium contains three papers that explore relations between coparenting and fathering from multiple disciplinary perspectives (social work, family studies, and psychology), use multiple methods (secondary data, observations, and experience sampling), and focus on populations in the U.S. and Europe. Paper 1 examines the role of coparenting relationships in fathers’ involvement in caregiving and play activities with young children using survey data from a large, diverse sample of low-income U.S. families. Paper 2 examines the roles of coparenting and intuitive parenting in the quality of fathers’ parenting using rich observational data from a longitudinal study of dual-earner U.S. couples with infants. Paper 3 employs latent class analysis to identify different constellations of coparenting and fathering using interview, observational, and experience sampling data from Austrian parents of toddlers. These papers affirm the importance of assessing coparenting relationships in studies of fathers and their children. Our discussant will facilitate consideration of ways to use these findings to support healthy father-child relationships in pediatric settings.

Sub Unit

• Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Chair

• Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Ohio State University

Discussant

• Craig F Garfield, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Coparenting Quality Predicts Low-income Residential Fathers’ Involvement with Their Young Children - Presenting Author: Joyce Y Lee, University of Michigan; Brenda Volling, University of Michigan; Shawna J. Lee, University of Michigan

• Fathers’ Parenting Quality during Infancy: The Roles of Coparenting and Intuitive Parenting - Presenting Author: Lauren E Altenburger, The Ohio State University; Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Ohio State University; Claire Kamp Dush, Ohio State University

• Fathers as Co-Parenting Parents in Different Partnership Constellations - Presenting Author: Lukas Teufl, University of Vienna; Barbara Supper, University of Vienna; Lieselotte Ahnert, University of Vienna