The current investigation examined the differential susceptibility of parents to the effects of marital quality on changes in parenting. We predicted that parents who were high on the personality constructs Negative Affect and Constraint would be more susceptible to the effects of marital quality on their level of sensitivity. Sensitivity was assessed at 3.5 and 13 months for both mothers and fathers during a triadic interaction. Consistent with the differential susceptibility theory, results suggested that when mothers were high on Negative Affect and when fathers were high on Constraint, their marital quality was associated with changes in sensitivity. This investigation suggests that personality factors may create “vulnerabilities” in parents that make them differentially susceptible to the effects of the family environment on parenting.
Parental sensitivity is often considered one of the most important aspects of quality caregiving. Early parental sensitivity has been linked to a number of positive child outcomes including: attachment security (de Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997), enhanced cognitive development (Lemelin, Tarabulsy, & Provost, 2006), and higher levels of school readiness (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1999). In light of its established significance for child development, the precursors and correlates of parental sensitivity are of great interest to researchers.
Family systems researchers are particularly interested in how families develop and change over time (Cox and Paley, 2003 and Darling and Steinberg, 1993). During the transition to parenthood, parents must learn how to behave toward their new baby and toward each other in new ways (Cox, 1985). This learning process implies that parenting may not be stable—particularly during the first year of life—as parents are adjusting to their new family system. Research has confirmed that parenting is less stable during infancy than when children are older (Holden & Miller, 1999). Thus, parenting patterns may become established toward the end of infancy, and these patterns may remain stable across childhood. Examining the predictors of increases or decreases in parenting quality during this transition may help identify families at risk for developing and/or maintaining insensitive parenting patterns across childhood.
In addition to understanding changes in parenting across time, the study of parenting in multiple contexts is also valuable for understanding family systems. Past research has focused primarily on dyadic parent–child contexts. Family systems theory, however, calls for examinations of parenting in other contexts, particularly the triadic context (Minuchin, 1985 and Minuchin, 1988). Children in two-parent families spend a significant amount of time in triadic interaction with both parents present (Craig, 2006). Thus, it is important for researchers to examine this often ignored context.
Parents act differently toward their children when their spouse is present than they do in dyadic parent–child interactions (Belsky, 1979, Buhrmester et al., 1992, Goldberg et al., 2002 and Lindsey and Caldera, 2006). As such, studying the quality of interaction in a triadic context allows researchers to see a unique and more complex slice of family life (McHale, 1995 and McHale and Rasmussen, 1998). Changes in parenting across time have been investigated in the dyadic context, and we extend our work to further understand the predictors of change in parenting in the triadic context.
