Poster #57 - A Dimensional Approach to Discrepancy in Parenting Styles

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

Parenting styles have been associated with child mental health outcomes, academic achievement, adaptive functioning, delinquency and interpersonal relationships (Kaufmann et al., 2000), but little attention has been given to the mother-father differences in parenting styles within the family. Often discrepancy in parenting styles is considered as a metric reflecting discord in the family; however, this interpretation typically lacks quantitative foundation outside of difference scores, failing to account for the direction, magnitude, and relevance of the discrepancy. The primary goal of the current study was to investigate the associations between self- and partner-perceived parenting styles of mothers and fathers and child wellbeing. We investigated the magnitude and the direction of evaluation (agreement vs. disagreement) between self-reported and partner-reported parenting styles as they relate to child mental health problems, assessed by Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA), using teacher’s (TRF; Achenbach, 1991) and parents’ report (CBCL; Achenbach, 1991). We hypothesized that discrepancy between self-perceived and partner-perceived indices of parenting styles, operationalized as parental warmth and demandingness, would predict the presence and severity of mental health problems in children. The sample consisted of 306 and 306 fathers with children (54.2% girls) in the age range of 8-17 years (M = 12.59, SD = 2.84) living in Russia. Latent profile analysis was used to identify distinct subgroups of children with similar patterns of mental health problems, accounting for homotypic and heterotypic comorbidity. A response surface analysis (RSA) was utilized to test the congruence hypothesis between parental reports and their predictive ability of children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Results using traditional difference scores approach showed that compared to partner’s reports mothers tended to underestimate their warmth, while fathers tended to underestimate their expression of both warmth and demandingness. We observed that children whose fathers overestimated their warmth were likely to show low levels of mental health problems. In contrast, children whose fathers overestimated their demandingness, exhibited moderate levels of mental health problems. Findings using polynomial regression and response surface analysis indicated that parental agreement on excessively warm parenting, which is associated with the lack of disciplinary firmness, is linked to externalizing in children. Results suggested that children tend to have a higher number of behavioral problems when mothers’ and fathers’ ratings of mothers’ demandingness match at lower levels of demandingness. This finding points to a permissive parenting style being a risk factor. Finally, we observed that distinct parenting styles can lead to similar outcomes, in line with the concept of equifinality. The study expands the existing literature by identifying latent profiles of mental health problems in children as they relate to discrepancies in perceptions of parenting styles.

Authors

• Marina Zhukova, University of Houston
  Presenting Author

• Nan Li, University of Houston

• Elena L Grigorenko, University of Houston