Coparenting within the Family System: Influences on Children's Development

Abstract

Understanding the contributions that different family relationships make to child development presents an imposing challenge. This is due, in part, to the fact that families are complicated systems. Take for example the case of a family with two adults and two children; there are husband-wife, parent-child, and sibling relationships that all play a unique role in children's experiences. Similarly influential forces are present for children's growth within family triads (e.g., parent-child-sibling and parent-parent-child), On the basis of these constellations and the demands inherent within each relationship, the possibilities seem endless for the associations between family relations and individual development. For decades, scholars have conducted extensive theoretical and empirical work to enhance our understanding of the contributions made by these various family relationships to child development. For instance, parenting styles (Baumrind, 1978) and sibling relations (Dunn, 1988) have been found to be systematically associated with children's growth and development. Additionally, links between marital satisfaction and child well-being (e.g., Belsky, Youngblade, Rovine, & Volling, 1991) and parent-sibling relations and child behavior (Dunn & Munn, 1985) have been revealed. Furthermore, the bidirectional nature of parent-child relationships has been explored (Bell, 1968; Belsky, 1990); not only do parents' words and actions influence children's development, the behavioral tendencies of children can make parenting more or less pleasant. Although this body of work has contributed enormously to our understanding of families and child development, questions as to the processes by which these relations play a role in children's lives remain unanswered. The issue of process is especially striking regarding the connections between marriage, parenting, and child development (for a review, see Gable, Belsky, & Crnic, 1992). Researchers have found that harmonious marriages tend to be associated with more sensitive, responsive, and supportive parenting and, in turn, with more favorable child outcomes, such as attachment security and interpersonal competence (Belsky et al., 1991; Howes & Markman, 1989, 1991). Additionally, investigators have reported that troubled marriages are often related to less effective parenting and more problematic child behavior (Kerig, Cowan, & Cowan, 1993). Despite these relations, it must be acknowledged that such associations fluctuate in magnitude and are not uniformly found. In fact, a recent meta-analysis indicated that the mean effect size for the correlation between marital discord and child behavior problems across studies is modest at best (Reid & Crisafulli, 1990). These results prompt a call to redirect efforts in the study of marriage, parenting, and child development. One such move involves going beyond global assessments of marital quality and satisfaction to more domain-specific and process-oriented accounts of marital functioning (Jouriles, Farris, & McDonald, 1991; Jouriles, Murphy, et al., 1991; Vuchinich, Vuchinich, & Wood, 1993). With this notion in mind, the central thesis of this article is that learning about husbands and wives as coparents will serve to further illuminate the processes that link marriage, parenting, and child development. Before we provide a theoretical rationale for investigating the coparenting relationship, a review of background research will be offered. Specifically, we will present a developmental overview of the associations between marriage, parenting, and child development. After this presentation, recent efforts to specify which aspects of the marital relationship are central to understanding the coparenting alliance will be considered. The article will conclude with a discussion of preliminary results from an ongoing study of coparenting processes in families raising firstborn toddler sons. BACKGROUND Previous research has shown that there are positive associations between the quality of marital relations and parenting effectiveness and indicators of children's well-being. …