Meta-parenting, defined as parents thinking about their parenting, has been identified and is a new field of research. The purposes of this study were to add to the existing knowledge of meta-parenting and to compare the influences of gender, work status, and parenting experience on meta-parenting occurring in parents of infants and toddlers. Sixty parents participated either electronically or by completing a written survey and reported engaging from "sometimes" to "usually" in four domains of meta-parenting: anticipating, assessing, reflecting, and problem-solving. Gender, work status, and parenting experience did not significantly influence participants' meta-parenting scores. Parents were found to have a higher sense of satisfaction and overall sense of competence when they engaged in higher levels of meta-parenting.

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.