Taraban & Shaw (2018). Parenting in context: Revisiting Belsky’s classic process of parenting model in early childhood.” – Article summary

According to Jay Belsky’s process of parenting model, parenting is determined by characteristics of the parent, child and family social context. Parental personality and parental psychological functioning are important factors in the parental domain. In the child’s domain, a difficult temperament is important. In the social context domain, parents’ work habits, sources of parental social support and marital relationship quality are important. 

Positive parenting refers to dimensions of parenting such as warmth, sensitivity, limit setting, appropriate scaffolding and contingency-based reinforcement. Negative parenting refers to behaviours that are inconsistent, over-reactive, controlling and harsh. Negative parenting has been linked to negative child outcomes (e.g. lower academic achievement) while positive parenting has been linked to adaptive child outcomes. Associations between parenting and child outcomes are stronger in early childhood. Adolescence may also be a critical period.

Fathers have taken up a larger parenting role over the recent years. Research shows that the parenting of fathers is subject to contextual influence and has a great impact on child outcomes.

According to Belsky, there are three primary predictors of parenting:

1. Developmental history
   This may predispose the parent to have certain traits which impact the ability to parent. There is evidence for the intergenerational transmission of parenting for mothers, highlighting the importance of developmental history. Parenting and family climate one experiences as a child is a strong predictor of future parenting for mothers.
2. Personality
   
   1. Extraversion
      This is associated with high levels of energy, sociability, response to reward and optimism. This may lead to more sensitive and responsive parenting but the limited verbal ability of a child may lead to maladaptive outcomes due to the social desires of the parents. This may negatively impact fathers but not mothers.
   2. Agreeableness
      This is associated with cooperativeness, being trustful, prosocial and willing to compromise. This is associated with positive parenting because these people have a high investment in maintaining close social relationships. It may also be a protective factor against mother’s likelihood to engage in harsh parenting.
   3. Conscientiousness
      This is associated with being organized, dependable, responsible and orderly. This can aid parenting though extremely high levels of conscientiousness may be detrimental to parenting as there may be conflict between the chaos of a young child and the desire to be very organized. There is a positive association with warm parenting.
   4. Neuroticism
      This is associated with being anxious, insecure and emotionally unstable. It is negatively associated with adaptive parenting behaviours. The focus on their own distress impairs their ability to respond sensitively to the need of the child. It is negatively associated with warm parenting. This may impact mothers more than fathers.
   5. Openness
      This is associated with originality, imagination, open-mindedness and broad-ranging interests. This may lead to sensitive parenting though the desire for new activities may conflict with the need for repetitive tasks of parenting.
3. Psychopathology
   Depression is associated with impaired parenting as it may compromise mothers’ cognition, behaviour and affect. This leads to a neglect of the child’s socio-emotional needs. Depression may also have a detrimental effect on taking the child’s perspective into account. Negative rumination may also leave little mental space to focus on the child. Maternal depression may lead to lower positive parenting but also to lower quality mother-child interactions. Depression has a similar impact on fathers’ parenting. The impact of depression depends on chronicity and timing of the episode and socioeconomic status. The impact is larger during infancy and early childhood. Brief depression and chronic depression lead to more stress but chronic depressed mothers have more negative views of their child, impacting their parenting ability. Parental depression may compromise parenting most when they are also faced with others stressors (e.g. low SES, minority status).

Personality is associated with parenting as it influences how one thinks, feels and behaves. Maternal personality found a stronger impact on parenting cognition than on parenting practices. Parents’ parenting-related cognitions shape parenting practices and this influences the effectiveness of parenting behaviours. Mothers’ sense of efficacy and parenting-related knowledge influences the effectiveness of parenting.

Extraversion in mothers may function as a support mechanism as these social networks are more likely to be focused on parenting. For fathers, this may not be the case, leading to negative child outcomes. This may only be the case for children that have low effortful control and for children with high effortful control, the opposite pattern may occur. The younger a child is, the stronger the association between agreeableness and neuroticism and parental warmth.

Disengaged parenting refers to non-involvement, unresponsiveness, flat affect and few vocalizations. Technoference refers to interruptions in parent-child interactions caused by technology. Emotional flooding refers to when one perceives their interaction partner’s negative affect as overwhelming and engages in an escape response. This may lead to harsh discipline practices.

Temperament refers to biologically-based differences in reactivity and behavioural style that are detectable in very early childhood. There are three dimensions of temperament:

1. Surgency (i.e. approach behaviour)
2. Effortful control (i.e. attentional focusing and inhibitory control)
3. Negative emotionality (i.e. tendency to react to stressors with high level of emotionality such as irritability).
   This may make a child more difficult to parent, eliciting negative parental behaviours. It may depend on the parents’ perception of the child’s difficulties. It may be differentially interpreted by mothers and fathers as mothers have a lower sense of efficacy when perceiving NE than fathers. Child NE is associated with changes in negative but not positive parenting for fathers. Negative parenting may also lead to increases in NE.

Temperamental differences in children influence parenting as it makes the child easier or more difficult to manage. The interaction hypothesis states that the impact of child NE on parenting is dependent on characteristics of the caregiver and caregiving environment, specifically SES. Mothers who are financially secure (i.e. high SES) may me able to work with the child’s difficult temperament rather than against it.

Harsh parenting may impact child NE because it teaches the children to use negative emotions when interacting with and problem-solving with others and develop less effective skills for controlling their own emotional distress. Child genetic effects interact with contextual factors to shape parenting in early childhood.

The main effect model of social support states that social support positively impacts parenting regardless of context. The buffering effects model of social support states that social support has a greater impact on mothers’ parenting who are experiencing more contextual stressors (e.g. poverty). The quality of social support may be very important rather than only the presence of it.

Marital quality consists of marital satisfaction and marital conflict. The compensatory hypothesis states that parents turn to the parent-child relationship to fulfil needs that are not being met in their marriage. This would lead to more optimal parent-child relationships under circumstances of marital dissatisfaction and distress. The spill over hypothesis states that parents in happy relationships will be better equipped to respond with warmth and sensitivity to their children whereas the opposite occurs for people in relationships with high levels of conflict. The spill over hypothesis finds most support.

Marital relationship may have a greater impact on paternal parenting. The fathering vulnerability hypothesis states that the parenting of fathers is susceptible to distress because fathers are less able to compartmentalize emotions and insecurities leading to a spillover of negativity during interactions with their children.

Marital conflict is more strongly associated with parenting of daughters compared to sons. High marital quality is associated with greater paternal warmth in interactions with daughters but not with sons. Child gender appears to moderate the effect of marital quality but there is no consensus. Marital quality may have the biggest effect for non-matching gender (e.g. father daughter, mother son).

Single parents display lower levels of control and warmth and provide less monitoring and discipline for their children. Family structure may affect parenting and child outcomes. There are cultural differences in parenting. Some personality traits may be beneficial for parenting across cultures but culture moderates the impact of neuroticism on parenting.

Socioeconomic status may increase the strength of associations between contextual factors and early childhood parenting.