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The relationship between involvement in children's health care, the moderating effects of parenting beliefs between involvement and child health status and use, and the mediating effects of family integrity in fathers' involvement and child health were examined in two separate studies. The first study includes 760 fathers from a national survey project. Involvement, parenting beliefs, and demographic variables were used to predict child health and health use. Fathers' residency status was correlated with the number of times the doctor was consulted and predicted the child's height-to-weight ratio. Participation in fun activities and shopping was associated with sickness and child height-to-weight ratio. No moderation effects were found for parenting beliefs. The second study uses a mixed methods design to which fathers' perceptions of involvement, motivations, barriers, and support by their child's mother are examined qualitatively. The associations between father demographic variables, barriers to attendance, family integrity, and modernity in predicting involvement are and child health status are tested. The mediating effects of family integrity between involvement and child health were also studied quantitatively. Seventeen fathers were included in the qualitative analysis. Fathers perceived that participation in their child's health care is important and felt supported by their child's mother. Barriers to involvement included work-related difficulties and a poor relationship with their child's mother. A total of 52 fathers were included in the quantitative analysis. Fathers' biological relationship to the child was associated with involvement. Additionally, family integrity and parenting beliefs predicted involvement. No evidence was found for mediation effects of family integrity between involvement and child health. These results have implications for community programs and practitioners with the aim of improving child health. / Ph. D.

Although many international and South African studies have investigated teenage parenting, they have rarely viewed the parenting support given to teenage mothers from a coparenting perspective. Coparenting is defined as the manner in which caregivers who are responsible for the upbringing of children, work together in their role as parents to negotiate the child rearing process. Consequently, much of the literature on teenage parenting remains inconclusive in terms of the beneficial nature of parenting support. In South Africa, very little is currently known about the availability of parenting support to teenage mothers from members of the extended family or from the child’s father and about the quality and processes that underlie these parenting relationships. A considerable body of evidence has found the quality of this relationship to be an important facilitator of parenting competence and a predictor of child development outcomes. Coparenting theory and constructs have largely been developed within nuclear, Western family structures that limit their generalizability and applicability to other family systems and contexts. Using a synergistic mixed methods research approach, this study examined the coparenting arrangements and relationship quality of 36 teenage mothers. Quantitative and qualitative data from the teenage mothers, their coparents and key community informants were used to understand coparenting within a particular low-income community where teenage parenting was found to be prevalent. The results revealed that the majority of teenage mothers could identify at least one coparent. A multi-person coparenting arrangement –typically coparenting with both the grandmother and the child’s father – was found to be more common than coparenting with only one other person. The newly developed, multi-domain measure of coparenting quality indicated that teenage mothers’ relationship with coparents was supportive, with minimal conflict and undermining by coparents. Qualitative differences in the roles of coparents revealed that coparenting fathers took on more traditional roles as providers and decision makers in comparison to grandmothers, who mainly performed mentoring roles to facilitate the teenage mothers’ maternal competence. The implications of these findings for coparenting theory as well as interventions and policies related to teenage parenting are discussed. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (CAAC) / Unrestricted

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Marital relationships play an important role in family functioning and in the development of sibling relationships. From a family systems perspective, other subsystems within the family, such as coparenting interactions, could explain the effects of the marital relationship on sibling bonds. Specifically, the quality of the coparenting relationship may mediate the association between marital functioning and sibling relationship quality. The current study examined relationships between these three subsystems (marital, coparenting, and sibling) as self-reported by mothers, fathers, and children with siblings. As part of a larger project, families with a child aged 8 to 11 and at least one sibling (N = 75) completed the Dyadic Adjustment Scale and the Coparenting Scale (both completed by mother and father), as well as the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire (completed by target child). Results suggested that marital functioning is a significant predictor of functioning within the coparenting relationship. Predicted associations did not emerge between sibling relationship quality and marital or coparenting relationships, with minor exceptions, and the coparenting relationship did not mediate the association between marital and sibling relationship quality. Implications of the current findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

This study assessed marital quality, coparenting, and parenting stress over time for parents of children with intellectual disability by creating developmental trajectories from longitudinal data. Both mothers and fathers (N = 152 couples), with children ages 6-18 at the first wave, evaluated their relationship and parenting stress on up to 4 occasions over a 14-year period. The study provided separate models of change over time for mothers and fathers which showed that marital quality, coparenting, and parenting stress are dynamic relationship constructs that changed during the child’s development. Overall, marital quality was found to follow a curvilinear pattern, with declines when children were adolescents and increases as children entered young adulthood. Positive coparenting increased linearly over time for mothers and fathers, and negative coparenting declined linearly for mothers. With an emphasis on transition periods in the family life cycle, trajectories included indicators of the child’s development to allow for periods of discrete change in the trajectories based on the child’s entrance into adolescence and young adulthood. The child’s entrances into these developmental periods were associated with changes in levels of marital quality and coparenting for mothers only. Patterns for stress over time depended on the parent reporting, with mothers reporting decreases in parent and family problems over time and a quadratic trend for pessimism, with initial growth in reported pessimism followed by declines as the children exited adolescence. Fathers, however, did not report significant changes for parent and family problems and perceived increases in pessimism with time. The study also assessed how support in the marital and coparenting roles with time is associated with levels of parenting stress. Marital quality consistently predicted lower levels of parent and family problems for both parents, but findings for associations between marital quality and pessimism, and coparenting with both types of stress, varied depending on the parent reporting.

Parenting self-efficacy is an important construct in understanding parents' choices about their child-rearing. Associations between marital and coparenting relationships have been established in prior research. Most of these studies used global assessments of marital quality, marital satisfaction, or measures of conflict to predict to the quality of the coparenting relationship. The present study is unique in that it utilizes multiple dimensions of marital quality, including satisfaction, maintenance strategies, and conflict, to examine the associations between marriage, coparenting, and parenting self-efficacy. These associations were explored using the Family Systems framework, comparing the explanatory power of the additive and compensatory processes. Of the marital quality indices, maintenance was the strongest, most consistent predictor of parenting cognitions for mothers and fathers, predicting to both parenting self-efficacy and meta-parenting. Mothers' reports of marital satisfaction were negatively associated with their, and their partner's, parenting self-efficacy. Undermining coparenting was predictive of parenting self-efficacy for mothers and fathers, but only predictive of meta-parenting for mothers. There was evidence supporting positive additive effects of marriage and coparenting on parenting self-efficacy. Maintenance for mothers, and marital satisfaction for fathers, combined with supportive coparenting to predict to even greater parenting self-efficacy. There was also support for the compensatory effect of marital quality on parenting self-efficacy for fathers. Fathers reporting higher levels of maintenance in combination with higher levels of undermining coparenting maintained their levels of parenting self-efficacy while fathers reporting lower levels of maintenance also reported less parenting self-efficacy in the face of higher undermining coparenting.

This study examined the role of nonresidential, Black fathers in the psychosocial adjustment of Black adolescents from single-mother households. Participants included 107 noncohabiting Black parental dyads with children between the ages of 12 and 18 years. Participants completed measures of positive parenting, parent-child relationship quality, depressive symptoms, coparenting relationship quality, and adolescents’ emotional and behavioral functioning. Results of hierarchical multiple regressions found that father factors contributed unique variance to adolescent outcomes when using father-reported and combined father- and mother-reported adolescent functioning. Coparenting relationship quality mediated the relationship between father-child relationship quality and adolescent behavioral problems when using mother-reported and combined father- and mother-reported adolescent functioning. This study highlights the unique contributions of nonresident Black father factors to adolescent outcomes and supports the need for further research in this area.

From a family systems theoretical view, this paper uses both variable-oriented and person-oriented research approaches to examine parental marriage as a dynamic, interdependent system, and extends the literature by examining parental marriage across a 15 year time span. Employing latent growth curve analysis of 490 mother-father dyads from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this study considers multiple aspects of the relationship husbands and wives have together as spouses (emotional intimacy), parents (ideas about discipline and a child-centered vs. adult-centered orientation to childrearing), coparents (agreement regarding parenting beliefs and discipline), and household managers (agreement on the division of household and childcare tasks), exploring these associations from one month post-partum to when the child is 15 years old. Second, using latent class growth analysis, this study explores how these factors come together in different relationship classes to form distinct typologies of change for these stably partnered parents. In general mothers and fathers show similar trends in emotional intimacy over time—with decline during the early years after child birth followed by a modest increase through first grade and then relative stabilization until age 15. They also report similar levels of authoritative discipline strategies and adult-centered parenting beliefs. On average mothers are responsible for approximately twice the amount of family work than are fathers. The latent class growth analysis revealed four distinct classes. The most significant differences between classes were in level of emotional intimacy and family work responsibility. Balancing of the instrumental and relational aspects of family life is posited as an explanation of between class differences.

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