Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Psychology
Rank at time of award: Professor
and
Dr. Joyce Lee, Social Work
Rank at time of award: Assistant Professor
and
Dr. Rin Reczek, Sociology
Rank at time of award: Professor
Across numerous disciplines and theoretical perspectives, the quality of parenting behavior and parent-child relationships experienced in early childhood is considered key to understanding individual differences in health and development across the lifespan. When developmental psychologists began to study parenting behavior systematically in the middle of the 20th century, their theories and approaches focused explicitly or implicitly on mothers. It was not until the 1970s and the 1980s that developmental psychologists began to study fathers systematically, establishing the most basic knowledge that fathers were, in fact, capable of parenting infants and young children, by behaving sensitively towards them and serving as sources of security.
Since that time, research on fathers has ebbed and flowed, but it has not caught up to the volume of work on mothers' parenting behavior or mother-child relationships. Existing research on fathers has been conducted primarily within the context of heterosexual couples. Moreover, the ways in which fathers' parenting behavior has often been measured differ from typical assessments of mothers' parenting behavior. For example, assessments of fathers' parenting have typically focused on quantity of involvement, whereas assessments of mothers' parenting have typically focused on quality of interactions. Some have argued that assessments of fathers' parenting need to better capture the quality of father-child interactions, but this has reinvigorated a debate regarding how fathers' parenting behavior ought to be measured. The central point of contention is whether mothers' and fathers' parenting behaviors are more similar than distinct and ought to be measured in a parent gender-neutral manner, or whether mothers' and fathers' parenting behaviors are fundamentally different and cannot be measured in the same way.
While scholars of parent-child relationships have remained mired in this debate, families have been changing. Fathers' involvement in childcare rose from 2.5 hrs/wk in 1965 to 7hrs.wk in 2015. Research comparing mothers' and fathers' parenting behavior in the context of heterosexual relationships has not yielded clear-cut evidence for mother-father differences. With the rise in acceptance and legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S., and greater access to adoption and reproductive technology, more same-sex couples ar raising young children together. For example, recent data indicate that about 22% of married same-sex couples and 14% of unmarried same-sex couples had children under age 18 in the household. Research on the developmental outcomes of children raised by same-sex couples indicates no differences from children raised by different-sex couples, calling into question the notion that children need complementary parenting from mothers and fathers to develop optimally. Thus it is time to collect new data to inform updates to parenting measurement and thereby free the parenting field to move beyond an increasingly unproductive debate.
The long-term goals of this project are to advance the field by (1) improving measurement of parenting behavior by developing a reliable and valid, comprehensive, and gender-inclusive battery of observational parenting assessments that can be used in future research on families with young children; (2) creating parallel brief and gender-inclusive self-report measures that align with current knowledge regarding parenting behavior and can be used in large survey studies of human development, health, and wellbeing.
To fulfill our long-term goals, we are seeking seed grant funding to jump-start this project by collecting pilot observational and self-report data on a sample of N = 75 cis-gender couples with 24-to-36-month-old children, including couples with two cis men (n = 25), couples with two cis women (n = 25), and couples with one cis man and one cis woman (n = 25). These are our specific aims:
Aim 1: Inform and refine parenting measurement by collecting intensive observational data on parenting behavior.
Aim 2: Test whether parent gender and partner's gender are associated with parenting behavior.
Aim 3: Test relations of gender-linked personal characteristics and division of childcare with parenting behavior.
Aim 4: Test associations of parenting behavior with children's social-emotional development.
The data collected will be used to inform an R21 submission to NICHD to support additional data collection and survey development. The pilot data will be used to (1) refine the observational assessments to be used in the larger study, (2) generate effect size estimates to inform power analyses, and (3) provide evidence for successful recruitment of a sample diverse in couple type and in race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Given the significant time, effort, and resources required to conduct this pilot study, including recruitment, data collection and coding, and incentives for participation, we will be unable to complete this pilot study without the funding sought in this application.