Are two Good Parents Better Than one? Maternal and Paternal Interactions and Infant’s Social Adjustment

• In Event: 2-190 - The Role of the Father: Links Between Parent-Child Interactions and Children’s Social-Emotional Development

Integrative Statement

Introduction: A large body of work shows that children’s growth and development depend on the quantity and quality of their early home experiences. In particular, the quality of their relationships with their parents. Children who live in homes characterized by poverty, insensitive and negative parenting, and lacking opportunities for learning are likely to exhibit serious socioemotional difficulties that increase the likelihood of academic failure and negative adult outcomes. But studies of the quality of parent-child interactions in low-income families suffer from several limitations: (1) the bulk of these studies report SES-differences based on averages, thus masking the large variability in both parenting behaviors and children’s outcomes in these families (Ipsa et al., 2004); (2) nearly all of these studies are based on mother-child interactions, the studies that include fathers are rare and even rarer are studies that include both parents. Because fathers’ contribution to children’s development is unique, the exclusion of fathers from parenting is problematic and suggests that maternal effects might be overestimated (Cabrera et al., 2014); and, (3) the lack of data and methodological tools to assess the quality of parent-child interactions is another obstacle in the field. We address these gaps by using observational data of the quality of the mother- and father-child interactions with their infants in a sample of low-income African American and Latino families in the U.S. to examine its links to children’s social development.

Research questions: Guided by the bioecological model, we ask: (1) What is the association between the quality (i.e., sensitivity, intrusiveness, dyadic mutuality) of the mother- and father-child play interactions at 9 months and children’s social competence and behavior problems at 18 months (main effects)?; (2) are there parental moderation effects (mothers x fathers) of the quality of parenting on children’s social development(double jeopardy, accumulated advantage, or compensatory moderation effects). We expect that mothers and fathers will have a unique and significant effect on children’s behaviors and we also expect to find evidence for moderation effects between parents, but given the state of the literature we do not specify the direction of these effects.
Methods: This study uses data (n=144) from an ongoing longitudinal evaluation of a parenting intervention designed for first-time, low-income parents with 9-month-old infants. The sample consists predominately of ethnic minority and immigrant families (see Table 1). Children and their mothers and fathers were separately observed during 10 minutes of free play. We used the Qualitative Ratings for Parent-child Interactions coding scheme (Cox & Crnic, 2003) to assess quality of interactions.

Analysis and Preliminary Results: Preliminary coding results suggest that overall, mothers and fathers have moderate levels of sensitivity (3.57 out of 5) and low levels of intrusiveness (1.89 out of 5) when playing with their 9-month infants. Mother- and father-child dyads also have moderate levels of dyadic mutuality (3.36 out of 5) during free play interactions. We also plan to run a multiple regression to test for the main and interaction effects of both mothers’ and fathers’ parenting quality on children’s social competence and problem behaviors.

Authors

• Natasha Cabrera, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Avery Hennigar, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author