Are some children harder to coparent than others? Children's negative emotionality and coparenting relationship quality.

The current study examined relations between child temperament--specifically, negative emotionality--and parents' supportive and undermining coparenting behavior, and further tested whether marital adjustment moderated relations between child negative affect and coparenting. One-hundred eleven two-parent families with a 4-year old child participated in this study. Parents completed questionnaires to provide information on children's negative affectivity, marital adjustment, and the quality of their coparenting relationships. Furthermore, parents and children participated together in two 10-minute task-oriented interactions that were coded to assess coparenting behavior. As hypothesized, parents of children higher on levels of negative affect demonstrated greater undermining coparenting behavior. In addition, marital adjustment moderated relations between children's negative affect and parents' supportive coparenting behavior. However, contrary to expectations, couples with higher levels of marital adjustment were most vulnerable to effects of child negativity on supportive coparenting. Results suggest that high-quality marital relationships may not buffer the coparenting relationship from the effects of temperamentally difficult preschoolers.

Coparenting behavior moderates longitudinal relations between effortful control and preschool children's externalizing behavior.

BACKGROUND: Temperamental effortful control involves the voluntary control of attention and behavior. Deficits in effortful control put children at risk for developing externalizing behavior problems. Coparenting behavior, or the extent to which parents support or undermine each other's parenting efforts, has also been identified as an important correlate of children's socioemotional adjustment. The present study tested whether coparenting behavior moderated longitudinal relations between preschool children's effortful control and their externalizing behavior. METHODS: Ninety-two families (mother, father, 4-year-old child) participated. Parents' coparenting behavior was observed during family interaction, and children's effortful control was rated by parents. At that time and one year later, mothers and teachers reported on children's externalizing behavior. RESULTS: Supportive coparenting behavior moderated longitudinal relations between children's effortful control and mothers' and teachers' reports of their externalizing behavior, even when taking into account initial levels of externalizing behavior. CONCLUSIONS: Effective coparenting served as a buffer for children, such that when parents displayed high levels of supportive coparenting behavior, the link between low effortful control and increases in externalizing behavior was not observed.

The Role of Infant Temperament in Stability and Change in Coparenting Across the First Year of Life.

OBJECTIVE: The current study investigated the role of infant temperament in stability and change in coparenting behavior across the infant's first year. Specifically, bidirectional relations between infant temperament and coparenting were examined and temperament was further considered as a moderator of longitudinal stability in coparenting behavior. DESIGN: Fifty-six two-parent families were recruited to participate during their third trimester of pregnancy. Coparenting behavior was assessed in families' homes when infants were age 3.5 months and in a laboratory setting at 13 months postpartum. Mothers and fathers also reported on their infant's temperamental difficulty at 3.5 and 13 months. RESULTS: Evidence for bidirectional relations between infant temperament and coparenting was obtained. Early infant difficulty, as reported by fathers, was associated with a decrease in supportive coparenting behavior across time; conversely, early supportive coparenting behavior was associated with a decrease in infant difficulty. Moreover, infant difficult temperament moderated stability in undermining coparenting behavior, such that undermining behavior at 3.5 months predicted undermining behavior at 13 months only when infants had less difficult temperaments. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that infants may play a role in the early course of the family processes that shape their development. With respect to practice, these results suggest that early intervention in the coparenting subsystem is essential for families, particularly those with temperamentally difficult infants.

Learning about tools in infancy.

These experiments explored the role of prior experience in 12- to 18-month-old infants' tool-directed actions. In Experiment 1, infants' use of a familiar tool (spoon) to accomplish a novel task (turning on lights inside a box) was examined. Infants tended to grasp the spoon by its handle even when doing so made solving the task impossible (the bowl did not fit through the hole in the box, but the handle did) and even though the experimenter demonstrated a bowl-grasp. In contrast, infants used a novel tool flexibly and grasped both sides equally often. In Experiment 2, infants received training using the novel tool for a particular function; 3 groups of infants were trained to use the tool differently. Later, infants' performance was facilitated on tasks that required infants to grasp the part of the tool they were trained to grasp. The results suggest that (a) infants' prior experiences with tools are important to understanding subsequent tool use, and (b) rather than learning about tool function (e.g., hammering), infants learn about which part of the tool is meant to be held, at least early in their exposure to a novel tool.