Strong Marriage Relationship Central to
Positive Parenting
The qualities of the relationship between
a husband and wife affect their children's cognitive and social competence.
Some psychologists believe that the marital relationship provides the primary
physical, emotional, and physical support for parents. As a result, the
relationship that exists in the marital relationship affects the couple's
parenting behaviors, which in turn impacts the adjustment of the children. For
example, studies have shown that a harmonious marriage relationship promotes
competence and maturity in their children. Other studies have demonstrated that
marital conflict may result in cognitive delay, school difficulties, and
antisocial or withdrawn behavior.
Couples who are satisfied in the marriage
relationship are more likely to agree about expectations for their children.
This provides consistent expectations to the children. In addition, children
learn about attachment, love, and security from their early care givers.
Parents who model positive relationship behavior contribute to the their
children's attitudes toward intimate relationships and long-term relationship
stability.
Couples who do not feel supported in the
marital relationship may have lower self-esteem and interact differently with
their children than their counterparts who have warm, responsive relationships.
This seems to hold true regardless of whether a family's oldest child is
preschool age or in the nine to 13-year-old range.
Spouses
can support each other in several ways:
Spouses
can act as potential reservoirs for love and affection, providing both comfort
and emotional security for one another. Often self-esteem is bolstered and a
sense of efficacy exists.
It
is no secret that child-rearing can be very demanding. However, spouses can
provide important tangible assistance for one another. Sharing household
chores, child care, work-related tasks, family and friendship obligations, and
community responsibilities reduces individual stress loads and provides mutual
support.
Marital
partners can be important sources of information, advice, and problem-solving
strategies for both personal and work-related matters.
Much
time and energy have been devoted to helping parents develop specific parenting
skills. However, interventions that help parents improve their personal
adjustment and the quality of their marriage may prove beneficial for the marriage,
the parent-child relationship, and the child's development.
Developing
family rituals provides meaning for family interactions and helps clarify roles
and responsibilities within the family. Family rituals can be anything from
religious observances, such as a child's first communion, to daily
interactions, such as how family members greet one another when someone returns
home. Creating and maintaining family rituals on a daily basis is an important
part of family life.
Plan
leisure activities as a couple that offer plenty of opportunities for
communication. The old saying, "The family that plays together, stays
together," may be partially true. However, research has indicated marital
satisfaction is more closely related to good communication during leisure
activities.
Plan
time alone where talk about the children and work are off limits. Going on a
date doesn't have to cost a lot of money. In fact, it could be as simple as
planning a midnight stroll while the children are staying over with friends or
relatives. Some frugal couples swap baby-sitting on date night with the parents
of their children's playmates.
Many
people want nothing more than the person they care most about to really listen
to them. Give your partner focused attention so he or she knows his or her
comments are top priority. Listen with an attitude of acceptance and
willingness to understand. Listen with an attitude that seeks clarification.
You may need to ask questions or paraphrase to be assured you have the correct
meaning of the message being sent.
A
satisfying marriage relationship grows best when a couple nurtures sexual
intimacy. The sexual relationship can flourish when the couple creates
companionship, makes a lasting commitment, and deepens their passion for one
another.
Inevitably,
even the best marriages face conflict. When one spouse has been offended by the
other, rather than letting a wall go up between the two of them, they must
confront the conflict. Usually, resolving conflict requires both seeking
forgiveness and granting forgiveness. The final process is working toward
reconciliation and rebuilding trust with your partner.
Parents
who are concerned about the cognitive and social development of their children
can devote their first energies to developing a strong marriage relationship.
The parenting alliance is defined as the
"capacity of a spouse to acknowledge, respect, and value the parenting
roles and tasks of the partner" (Weissman & Cohen, 1985, p. 26). A
disrupted parenting alliance has been associated with child maladjustment,
social incompetence, and behavior problems (Abidin & Brunner, 1995; Bearss
& Eyberg, 1998). On the other hand, researchers assert that a strong
parenting alliance can help parents and children combat the deleterious effects
of family stress and even divorce (e.g., Abidin & Brunner, 1995). Despite
the obvious importance of this construct, the foundations of this alliance are
not yet well understood.
Though the parenting alliance has been
described as a separate construct from the marital relationship itself, there
is evidence that various characteristics of the marriage, such as marital
satisfaction, are related to the strength of the parenting alliance (Abidin
& Brunner, 1995; Floyd, Gilliom, and Costigan, 1998). The purpose of this
exploratory study is to investigate additional aspects of the marital
relationship that may predict the strength of the parenting alliance.
Specifically, marital power, defined as "the relative ability of either
spouse to influence the other" (Balswick & Balswick, 1995, p. 297),
may be another component of the marital relationship that is associated with
the parenting alliance, because perceptions of power imbalance may be
destructive to parents' view of themselves as a "team."
If marital power is indeed related to the
parenting alliance, it is possible that other variables, such as marital
satisfaction, marital conflict, and parental depression, mediate this
relationship. Previous research has shown that certain patterns of marital
power are associated with low marital satisfaction (Gray-Little & Burks,
1983), which may affect investment in parenting, especially for fathers (Floyd
et al., 1998). In addition, differential marital power may be related to
increased conflict, which may weaken the parenting alliance (Fauber, Forehand,
Thomas, & Wierson, 1990; McHale, 1995). Moreover, low marital power has
been associated with depression (Mirowsky, 1985), particularly in women, and
depression has been related to poorer parenting behaviors (Cummings & Davies,
1992; Kaslow, Warner, John, & Brown, 1992).
HYPOTHESES
Therefore, it was hypothesized that:
METHOD
Participants
are 60 married parents living in Knoxville, TN. Couples were recruited randomly
from a mailing list purchased by the experimenters and were compensated
according to their level of participation. As part of a larger, longitudinal
study of marital and family interactions, each spouse completed the following
self-report measures: the Relationship Dimensions Profile, Power-Partner
subscale (RDP; Daiuto & Baucom, 1994); the Dyadic Adjustment Scale,
Satisfaction and Consensus subscales (DAS; Spanier, 1976); the Center for
Epidemiological Studies –
Depression Scale (CESD; Radloff, 1977); and the Parenting Alliance Inventory
(PAI; Abidin & Brunner, 1995).
RESULTS
Hypothesis 1:
Means
and standard deviations are presented in Table 1. Correlational analyses
revealed a strong, negative relationship between marital power and parenting
alliance for fathers (r = -.534, p < .001). As expected,
fathers who reported that their spouses have more marital power tended to
report a weaker parenting alliance. Contrary to our hypothesis, however, no
significant relationship was found between levels of marital power and parenting
alliance for mothers. Correlations among all of the variables are presented in
Table 2.
Hypothesis 2:
Because
the association between marital power and parenting alliance was significant
for fathers but not for mothers, mediation could only be tested for fathers.
According to the procedures outlined by Baron and Kenney (1986), multiple
regression analyses were used to test the mediational models. As shown in Table
3, the results partially supported the hypotheses. For fathers, only marital
conflict fulfilled the requirements for full mediation. The requirements for
full mediation are met when the significance of the predictor variable
(power-other) drops to nonsignificance with the addition of the mediational
variable (conflict) to the regression equation. In summary, the mediational
analyses for fathers revealed that marital conflict alone can fully account for
the link between marital power and parenting alliance for fathers.
Hypothesis 3:
Because
marital power was significantly related to parenting alliance for fathers but
not for mothers, the gender differences predicted in Hypothesis 3 could not be
tested.
To
view the tables, click HERE.
DISCUSSION
This
study revealed interesting gender differences in the link between marital
power, or the level of power that one perceives his/her spouse to have in the
marriage, and the parenting alliance, or the sense of respect and teamwork
spouses have for each other as parents. Perceived levels of marital power were
associated with the strength of the parenting alliance for fathers, but not for
mothers. Moreover, the nature of the link between fathers' perceptions of
marital power and parenting alliance appears to be rather complex. The
mediational analyses revealed that levels of conflict within the marriage can
fully account for the relationship between marital power and parenting alliance
for fathers. However, it appears that other variables such as marital
satisfaction and depression may also be predictive of the parenting alliance
for both mothers and fathers, even though they may not play a mediating role.
The
findings of this study may be consistent with the tendency for couples to
operate within an egalitarian or traditional marital power structure, versus a
wife-favored power structure (Gray-Little & Burks 1983). It may be the case
that wives are used to parenting within households where their husbands have as
much or more power than they do, and so their parenting is less affected by
power differentials.
The results of this study have significant implications for clinical practice. For example, it is important for marriage and family therapists to keep in mind the wide range of marital characteristics that affect spouses' parenting alliance, as well as how this alliance is related to overall family functioning. The implications of this research are important when working with both intact and divorced families. Furthermore, given that the parenting alliance has implications for child behavior and adjustment (Abidin & Brunner, 1995; Bearss & Eyberg, 1998), it is imperative that researchers continue to further delineate the complex relationships between the marital relationship and the parenting partnership.
Associations between Marital Quality and
Parenting: Does Marital Quality Affect the Degree to which Parents Encourage
Autonomy in their Children?
The current study suggests a connection between the overall quality
of marital relationships and the amount of autonomy encouragement and autonomy
restriction married parents give to their children. The analyses are based on a
sub-sample of fifty-six parents (28 couples) who were participants in the School
Children and Their Families Project (SAF) and who completed (1) the
Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), used to measure adults' recollection of
receiving encouragement and/or restriction of autonomy from their parents, and
(2) "The Relationship Between My Parents" self-report questionnaire,
a measure of adults' perceptions and recollections of the quality of their
parents’ marital relationship when they were young
children. Overall positive marital quality between grandparents (SAF
participants’ parents) was related to grandfathers’
encouraging SAF daughter participants’ autonomy. The quality
of the grandparents' marriage was related to grandmothers’
restricting both sons’ and daughters' autonomy. Findings offer further
support for the marital-parental relationship linkage and indicate that a
supportive marital relationship may facilitate parents’
ability to engage in adaptive child rearing practices. Results highlight the
need for further examination of specific parenting practices vital to child
development that may be affected by the marital relationship.
Over the last two decades, researchers
have devoted increasing attention to the marital relationship, regarding it as
a key element in determining family functioning and individual outcomes. The
association between marital relations and child functioning is well documented
(Burman, John & Margolin, 1987; Cummings & Davies, 2002; Feldman,
Wentzel, Weinberger, & Munson, 1990; Gable, Belsky, & Crnic], 1992;
Gable, Margolin, Christensen, & John, 1996). Collectively, the empirical
investigations indicate that the quality of a marital relationship is
predictive of both positive and negative outcomes in children's adjustment
across developmental periods in both clinical and non-clinical samples.
Although the correlation between marital
relations and children's behavior is widely recognized, the pathways of
influence responsible for this relationship remain less clear. The present
investigation examines one possible pathway by exploring how the quality of the
marital relationship is related to spouses' parenting as measured by the degree
to which parents encourage children’s
autonomy. The purpose of this investigation is to determine whether parents'
overall marital quality relates to the degree to which these parents encourage
their children’s autonomy, a dimension in
parenting known to have beneficial effects on children. It is hypothesized that
marital satisfaction will be positively correlated with parental autonomy
encouragement — suggesting that a
supportive marital relationship may facilitate parents' abilities to engage in
adaptive child rearing practices.
Associations between Marital Quality
and Parenting
Although the work of Feldman and
colleagues (1990) documents an unmediated, direct effect of fathers' marital
satisfaction on sons’
change in academic achievement, it is also likely that children are influenced
indirectly by the effects of marital relations on parenting. Indeed, recent
research has revealed that marital dysfunction can spill over onto the
parent-child relationship and disrupt parenting.
Psychologists have used the term
"spill over" -- defined as the direct transfer of mood, affect, or
behavior from one setting to another -- to account for the interrelatedness of
the relationships between husband and wife and parent and child (Erel &
Burman, 1995). In accordance with the "spill over" hypothesis, a
harmonious and supportive marital relationship is associated with supportive,
responsive and involved parenting from infancy through adolescence (Arias &
Fincham, 1996). On the other hand, marital discord results in parents' being
less involved with their children and implementing harsh, less consistent and
less communicative disciplinary practices in comparison with couples in more
harmonious marriages (Cummings & Davies, 2002). These studies suggest that the
emotional support parents gain from their spouses and the overall quality of
their marital relationship can be expressed in the parent-child relationship.
Thus, when the marital relationship is strained, the behaviors and feelings
generated in the marriage can "spill over" and adversely affect both
parenting and child development.
In a meta-analysis, Erel and Burman found
a significant and positive relationship between the quality of the marital
relationship and the quality of the parent-child relationship (effect size .27)
proving that the marital relationship affects parent-child relationships (Erel
& Burman, 1995). However, researchers examining the association between the
marital relationship and the parent-child relationship differ with regard to the
particular aspect of parenting that they investigate. These dimensions include
the overall quality of the parent-child relationship (labeling it as positive
or negative), as well as satisfaction with parenting and between-parent
consistency (assessing the similarity between parents' ratings). However, few
reports look directly at specific parenting practices. In fact, Erel and
Burman's (1995) meta-analysis includes only two parenting practices (covert
control and discipline) as an index of the parent-child relationship quality.
Therefore, simply by concluding that marriages affect parenting based on the
parenting dimensions currently in the literature, researchers neglect other
unexamined parenting practices vital to children's development that might be affected
by the marriage relationship. Thus, an investigation exploring the relationship
between marital quality and specific child rearing practices is warranted.
The Role of Autonomy in Child
Development
Deci and Ryan's (1985,1991) self
determination theory postulates that human beings have psychological needs for
autonomy, competence, and relatedness, which are essential to their survival
and parallel in importance to the body’s
basic physical needs such as those for food and water. This theory highlights
the importance of autonomy by assuming that mental health is partly dependent
upon having relationships that are supportive of autonomy. Studies exploring
self-determination theory have shown that parental support of autonomy leads to
positive outcomes for children across different developmental periods (Allen,
Hauser, Eickholt, Bell, & O’Conner,
1994; Frodi, Bridges, & Grolnick, 1985; Mattanah, 1999).
Clark and Ladd (2000) define
"autonomy support" as the degree to which parents are responsive,
reflective, and validating of their children's opinions, feelings, and
perspectives. By actively encouraging children to explore their environment,
make independent decisions, and freely express themselves, parents can foster
their children's sense of independence. The capacity to make decisions
independently, to serve as one's own source of emotional strength, and to
manage life tasks without total dependence on others for assistance, is an
important developmental outcome in adolescence (Shaffer, 2002). Investigations
looking at the role of autonomy encouragement in adolescence show that
psychological autonomy makes independent contributions to the prediction of
self esteem, depression, antisocial behavior, social competence, and academic
achievement (Allen et al., 1994; Barber, Olsen, & Shagle, 1994; Steinberg,
Elmen, & Mounts, 1989).
This study follows the trend of studies
in family research that examine the interrelation of key family relationships.
Although much of the interest lies in how subsystems such as the marital
relationship affect individual family members, studies like this one focus on
the interaction of subsystems, that is, how one relationship (marriage) affects
another relationship (parent-child).
It is hypothesized that parents’ marital relationship is related to the parents’ ability to encourage autonomy in their children
because of the close tie between the relationships of husband and wife and
parent and child. In turn, it is possible that individuals in supportive
relationships are more likely to practice supportive strategies in other
relationships. A significant correlation between participants’ perceptions of their parents’ marital relationship and amount of autonomy
encouragement they were given as children, would indicate that there is a
systematic link between how the current participants described their parents'
relationship as a couple and how they described their parents' encouragement or
restriction of their autonomy when they were younger. In other words,
participants who are likely to describe their parents’ marital relationship as high in quality may also
be likely to recall having received positive parenting— because these general, adaptive qualities that
characterized their childhood are associated.
Method
This investigation uses data from the School
Children and Their Families Project (SAF), a longitudinal, intervention
study conducted by Philip A. Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan at University of
California, Berkeley Psychology Department. The SAF project focuses on family
systems and its relationship to marriage and child development. The
participating families visited the laboratory at five different points between
the eldest child’s last pre-kindergarten
year and ninth-grade. At each phase, families participated in extensive
assessments that included structured interviews, structured family observations
in the laboratory, and self-report questionnaires completed by parents and
teachers.
Participants
This study draws 28 families (28 mothers
and 28 fathers) from the larger sample of 100 families participating in the
longitudinal study that had both Adult Attachment Interviews coded for autonomy
encouragement and self-report data from the Family Relationships Questionnaire.
This group of 28 families (a total of 56 participants) comprised the sub-sample
used in the current study.
Demographically, the 28 families are
representative of the larger San Francisco metropolitan area. Twenty-five
percent of the families are African, Asian, or Latin American, and seventy-five
percent are Caucasian or European American. The median total annual income for
this sub-sample of families is 107,964 dollars. Families were largely middle
class, with the majority reporting some college education.
Over the last decade, many research
questions have been examined using the SAF project data set. However, to date,
no investigation has examined the relationship between scores on the
"Relationship Between My Parents" questionnaire and data gathered
from the participants' narrative responses to the Adult Attachment Interview
(AAI). In order to determine the relationship between marital quality and
parental autonomy encouragement this study correlates data from these two
measures.
Measures
Family Relationships
The Cowan’s
Family Relationships Questionnaire assesses an individual's global perceptions
of the positive and negative tone of relationships in his/her family of origin — relationships between the individual and father,
the individual and mother, and between father and mother. Each participant
rated the quality of these relationships based on recollections from childhood
and current perceptions, by answering six separate questions rated on a 7-point
Likert scale. The overall quality of the relationship is measured by combining
the six scores on separate questions assessing different dimensions:
uninvolved-involved, high-conflict, unhappy-happy, distant-close, cold-warm,
unsatisfying-satisfying. Scores measuring the quality of parents’ relationships were obtained by taking the sum of
the ratings for the six items; therefore, the maximum possible score was
forty-two and the minimum was six. Alpha reliability for the six scales
describing both past and present relationships were high, ranging from .85 to
.95. One component of the Family Relationship Questionnaire is the
"Relationship Between My Parents", which asks participants
specifically about their parents’
relationship as they recall it from childhood. This study correlates data from
the section of the questionnaire asking participants to reflect on their
parents' relationship during the participants’
childhood with data gathered from the participants' narrative responses to the
Adult Attachment Interview.
Autonomy Encouragement
Adult Attachment Interviews were
administered during the SAF adult participants’
eldest child's pre-kindergarten year. In the AAI, the interviewees (SAF parents
recruited for the study) report on their relationships with their parents
(grandparents of the child in the study). The interviews assess the adult's
current state of mind with regard to early attachment and elicit specific
descriptors of the adult's early relationship with each parent. This study uses
a new coding system developed by Miriam Hernandez (2002) to identify and
measure situations in which the participant recalled receiving encouragement of
autonomy or restriction of autonomy from his/her parents.
The coding system rated various
dimensions of the participants’
recollections of their childhood interactions with their parents. These
parenting dimensions included recollections of receiving autonomy
encouragement, autonomy restriction and emotional support. Coders made global
ratings on these parenting dimensions based on the participants’ reflections throughout the whole interview.
This study focuses on two items from the
coding scheme: global autonomy encouragement and global autonomy restriction.
Global autonomy encouragement was rated on a five-point scale, ranging from
"very high encouragement" to "very low encouragement." Very
high encouragement (a rating of 5) is defined as parents actively encouraging
their child's independence to a very high degree with strong verbal or physical
encouragement. Very low autonomy encouragement (a rating of 1) is defined as
the parent never or rarely encouraging his/her child's autonomy. A similar
five-point scale was used to rate global autonomy restriction with the scale
ranging from "very high restriction of child's autonomy" to "
very low restriction of child's autonomy." For every participant, a mean
score for both global autonomy encouragement and global autonomy restriction
was obtained by averaging the two raters' scores (for the autonomy
encouragement and restriction dimensions). This average indicates the degree of
autonomy encouragement or restriction that participants recall receiving from
their parents during childhood. Two independent coders coded each AAI
transcript in the spring of 2002; the reliability among coders was an alpha of
.92
Results
Both of the measures used in this design
are based on data gathered from the SAF adult participants as they reflected on
their relationships with their parents (AAI) and their parents’ relationship with each other (Family
Relationships Questionnaire) during childhood. In the following analyses, SAF
parents (those in the longitudinal study) are referred to as
"daughter" or "son," and the parents to whom they refer
(the SAF grandparents) are identified as their "mother" or
"father."
Global Autonomy Encouragement and
Global Autonomy Restriction
For SAF daughters, the mean score for
global autonomy encouragement received from mothers and fathers was 2.24 and
2.07, respectively. For SAF daughters, the mean score for global autonomy
restriction received from mothers and fathers was 2.30 and 1.69, respectively.
For SAF sons, the mean score for global autonomy encouragement received from
mothers and fathers was 2.10 and 2.34, respectively. For SAF sons, the mean
score for global autonomy restriction received from mothers and fathers was
2.21 and 1.71, respectively. There was no significant difference in how
daughters rated their parents on autonomy encouragement and restriction in
comparison to sons’
ratings of their parents.
Family Relationships Questionnaire
The mean marital quality score for SAF
daughters reporting on their parents’
past relationship was 26.09 (SD = 8.53), and for SAF sons it was 27.68 (SD =
7.05), with no significant difference between the means.
Overall Marital Quality and Global Autonomy
Encouragement and Global Autonomy Restriction
To test the hypothesis that the quality
of a marital relationship was linked to the amount of autonomy encouragement
given to children, Pearson bivariate correlations were calculated among
measures of parental autonomy encouragement and autonomy restriction and the
overall quality of the parents’
marital relationship. Marital quality was significantly and positively related
to fathers’ encouragement of their
daughters’ autonomy (r = .58, p <
.01, df (26)).
After quantitative results were obtained,
qualitative analyses were performed by reviewing the AAI transcripts of
participants whose scores for global autonomy encouragement/restriction and for
marital quality mirrored the quantitative findings. Direct quotes were
extracted from incidents when participants described their parent’s marital relationship and their parent’s encouragement or restriction of their autonomy
during childhood. The quotes are used to support and illuminate the
relationship between marital quality and parental autonomy encouragement,
determined by the quantitative analyses. Qualitative analyses of the AAI
transcripts supported the finding that fathers in high quality marital
relationships show higher rates of encouraging autonomy in their daughters. For
example, an SAF daughter recalling a relationship with her father that was
supportive of her autonomy stated that there was,
....tolerance
with him letting me do what I needed, which was I needed to be alone a lot...I
spent a lot of time just gone in the woods, and I always felt it was he who
defended that need to let me do that....the tolerance was allowing me to roam.
Reflecting on her parents’ relationship, she reported,
Sort of a white
picket fence relationship. I would say they were very, very, very, close, very
trusting, very supportive, uhm, in a very traditional way.
The following results demonstrate trends
in the statistical analyses that are not statistically significant for the
current sample size of 28 families. The correlation coefficients are moderate
in effect size and are expected to reach significance with increasing sample
size. Mothers, like fathers, appear to encourage their daughters’ autonomy when they are happier with their marital
quality (r = .29, p = ns). Like daughters, sons appear to receive more
encouragement from their mothers (r = .31, p = ns) and fathers (r =. 33, p =
ns) when their marital quality is high.
Similarly, when the overall quality of
their parents' marriage was rated as highly positive, sons (r = - .23, p = ns)
and daughters (r = -.29, p = ns) recalled receiving low levels of autonomy
restriction from their mothers, and qualitative analyses were consistent with
this finding. Conversely, when adults' recalled negative qualities in the marriages
of their parents, they reported greater restriction of their autonomy. For
example, an SAF mother explaining her early relationship with her mother said,
My mom tried to
sort of dictate me as to how I was going to be. I think she felt that I could
not make my own decisions and I am very independent, and I've always been like
that even as a little girl, and that was hard for her to accept.
When speaking about her parents’ relationship while growing up, she stated,
There were
times when they would fight, and he'd hit her and knock her around. I think
they had visions of how each other was going to be, and it didn't match, and I
just don't think they were happy.
