Coparenting and Child Behavior in Two Year Old Children of Minority Adolescent Mothers

Introduction. Children of adolescent parents have been shown to demonstrate greater social-emotional and behavior problems than children of adult parents (Pinzon & Jones, 2012), hence the need for prevention and early intervention. Coparenting quality is one factor that has been associated with externalizing and internalizing behaviors in children with adult parents (Teubert & Pinquart, 2010). Adolescent parents who are less likely to cohabite or be romantically involved (Gee & Rhodes, 1999) may be at greater risk for negative coparenting relationships. Understanding the association between coparenting and child behavior problems in this population is important for the development of preventive interventions (Feinberg, 2002). We examined the link between coparenting and externalizing and internalizing behaviors in two-year-old children of African American and Latina adolescent mothers. We hypothesized that negative coparenting quality would be associated higher levels of internalizing and externalizing and that these associations would be moderated by child gender. Specifically, the association between negative coparenting and externalizing would be stronger for boys than girls and the association between negative coparenting and internalizing would be stronger for girls than boys.

Method. Sixty-nine fathers and 66 mothers of two-year-old children independently completed the Parenting Alliance Inventory (Abidin & Brunner, 1995) assessing coparenting quality and the Child Behavior Checklist for children 1.5-5 years of age (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) assessing behavior problems. Multiple regression analyses with internalizing and externalizing behavior as the dependent variables were conducted separately for mother and father report.

Results. Neither mother nor father-reported coparenting quality had a significant main effect on either externalizing or internalizing. When predicting internalizing, there was a significant interaction between mother-reported coparenting and child gender (b=.98, p<.05), such more negative coparenting was associated with more internalizing problems. Additionally, there was a significant main effect for parent relationship status (not being in a romantic relationship predicted high internalizing) (b=-.31, p<.05) and the overall model predicting internalizing from mother report was significant, (F(69)=3.30, p<.05). Contrary to our hypotheses, there was no interaction between coparenting and child gender when predicting externalizing from mother or father report.

Conclusions. Our findings suggest that child gender moderates the association between coparenting quality and internalizing (but not externalizing) in two-year old children of African American and Latina adolescent mothers. Girls who experience higher levels of negative coparenting are at greater risk for internalizing behaviors, whereas boys appear to be less affected by negative coparenting. Yet, this effect was only significant for the mother report analysis. Perhaps mothers are more sensitive to monitoring girls’ internalizing. Prevention programs for adolescent parents should aim to strengthen coparenting quality, which can impact child adjustment among toddlers, particularly girls.