Links between different measures of mother/father involvement and child social adjustment

Abstract

The relative integration of fathers into the parental unit clearly poses numerous conceptual and methodological challenges despite the considerable progress that has been made in this area. Important social changes that have occurred over a relatively short period of time have resulted in a redefinition of parental roles which supports the pertinence of examining not just behavioural measures but also cognitive variables such as parents' respective perceptions of their roles. In this study, we have compared diverse quantitative measures of maternal and paternal involvement in relation to child psychosocial adjustment as assessed by parents and childcare teachers. This study was conducted with 45 dual-parent families having a preschool-aged child (20 girls, 25 boys). Both mothers and fathers completed five questionnaires. Childcare teachers (n = 33) participated in the study by assessing child social adjustment. The results indicate that, with regard to both mothers and fathers, cognitive measures are essentially proven to be the best predictive factors for child social adjustment. The results indicate that mothers who consider their professional employment as being important perceive their children as manifesting more externalising problems. The results are the opposite for mothers who value being present in the home. Child prosociality is linked to maternal prioritisation of emotional support for the child. Children of fathers who consider taking an active role in discipline to be important are assessed by childcare teachers as more socially competent. Also, children whose father values play interactions display fewer internalising behaviour problems according to assessments completed by teachers. The results will be discussed in terms of the respective contributions of these different ways of defining parental involvement. The discussion will adopt the perspective that the roles perceived by mothers and fathers are complementary.

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