Marital Adjustment, Joint Parental Support in a Triadic Problem-Solving Task, and Child Behavior Problems

Abstract

Extended prior research on relations between marital adjustment and behavior problems in children by examining how effectively mother and father pairs helped their child on a problem-solving task in a nonclinic sample. Results indicated that parental report of marital adjustment, especially as reported by fathers, was related to child behavior problems assessed by parents and teachers, and also to an index of joint parental support, which was defined as the degree to which family performance on a building-block task exceeded or fell short of what would be predicted based on the child's individual ability on a similar block task. Joint parental support also was related significantly to parental and teacher reports of child behavior problems. Discussion focuses on the implications of the findings as preliminary support for a model according to which triadic mother-father-child processes mediate associations between marital adjustment and children's functioning, and on the importance of augmenting data collection procedures to include information from multiple perspectives, especially from fathers.