Abstract
Nonresident African American (AA) fathers sometimes face challenges to achieving satisfaction with their parenting skills, which may inhibit their motivations for parenting. Studies have found that residential history of fathers is associated with parental involvement; however, current fatherhood programs rarely consider the influence of different residential history on fathering. In the current study, we examined whether nonresident AA fathers’ residential history with their sons moderated their parenting skills satisfaction after participating in the Fathers and Sons Program. Our results indicated that after controlling for fathers’ pretest parenting skills satisfaction, age, education, marital status, employment, and ever lived with their son’s mother; there was a moderating effect of residential history on the intervention’s effects on posttest parenting skills satisfaction. The regression analyses showed that fathers in the intervention group who had lived with their son increased their parenting skills satisfaction more at posttest compared with fathers who had never lived with their sons. However, fathers in the comparison group who had lived with their sons had lower posttest parenting skills satisfaction. Future fatherhood programs for nonresident AA fathers should develop more nuanced group-specific interventions that consider residential history as a critical factor to enhance their parenting skills satisfaction as a strategy for improving father involvement.
Highlights
Parenting satisfaction, defined as parents’ perceptions of pleasure and gratification regarding the parenting role [1], has been studied in several important domains including satisfaction with a parent’s child-rearing skills and performance, satisfaction with a parent’s relationship with child, as well as satisfaction with the spouse performance as a parent [2,3]
Based on t-test and Chi-squared analyses, we found that the fathers eliminated from the analyses were not different from those who remained in the study based on father’s age, ever lived with their son, ever lived with son’s mother, marital status, education level, employment status, and parenting skills satisfaction at pretest
Fathers who had lived with their son increased their parenting skills satisfaction more after the intervention compared with fathers who had never lived with their sons
Summary
Parenting satisfaction, defined as parents’ perceptions of pleasure and gratification regarding the parenting role [1], has been studied in several important domains including satisfaction with a parent’s child-rearing skills and performance, satisfaction with a parent’s relationship with child, as well as satisfaction with the spouse performance as a parent [2,3]. Our previous study found that among nonresident African American fathers and sons, fathers’ satisfaction with their parenting skills based on several parenting tasks, including communication about risky behaviors, socialization about race, and communication about sex, benefited their pre-adolescent sons’ development when sons felt more satisfied with fathers’ engagement [4] It is often challenging for many nonresident African American fathers to be involved in coparenting of their children and achieving high levels of parenting skills satisfaction as resident fathers since they most dependent on the relationship with the child’s mother to maintain a relationship with their child [11]. Studies have found that compared to other racial groups in the United
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