Developmental and interpersonal antecedents of parenting orientations and behavior: A life history perspective

Few events in life rival the importance of raising children. Compared to most species, humans invest heavily in their children, but some parents are neglectful, indifferent, or even hostile toward their children. This project examines why certain parents tend to invest more versus less time, effort, attention, support, and resources in their children. Little is currently known about: (a) what kinds of early-life events/experiences lead individuals to become more versus less investing parents in adulthood and (b) how parental investment is affected by the quality of the relationship with one's partner. In addition, the role that fathers play in parenting has been under studied, and relatively little is known about how partners co-parent their children as a function of their early-life experiences or the quality of their relationship. This research addresses these issues and is aimed at filling these critical gaps in knowledge and understanding of parenting practices and behavior.

Two studies will address these aims. In Study 1, new codings and analyses will be conducted on a unique longitudinal sample that has lifespan data on parenting outcomes (the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation; MLSRA). Participants in this sample have been continuously followed from before birth into middle adulthood. The MLSRA has excellent measures of how individuals were treated as children, what happened to them across development, and how they are parenting their own children years later in adulthood. This study will examine how certain early life experiences (e.g., the amount of life stress, the occurrence of maltreatment) prospectively predict parents' views about investing time, effort, and resources in their children and how they actually behave (based on video-recordings) when interacting with their children. Study 2 is a new laboratory study of parenting behavior involving mothers, fathers, and their first-born toddlers. This study, which involves video-recording mothers, fathers, and their toddler engaging in parenting tasks, will: (a) examine whether certain types of perceived early-life stress are associated with parenting attitudes and behavior in a family context, (b) investigate whether the quality of the partners' relationship buffers exposure to early-life stress, (c) identify whether certain types of perceived early-life stress are associated with fathers' and mothers' implicit (vs. explicit) parenting attitudes, and (d) determine whether implicit parenting attitudes mediate the relation between early-life stress and parenting attitudes and behavior.