Incongruent Teen Pregnancy Attitudes,Coparenting Conflict,and Support Among Mexican‐Origin Adolescent Mothers

The current longitudinal study examined whether differences between Mexican‐origin adolescent mothers and their mother figures (N = 204 dyads) in attitudes on the status attained through teen pregnancy were associated with conflict in their coparenting relationship and whether coparenting conflict was associated with adolescent mothers' perceptions of social support. Findings revealed that when adolescents held more positive attitudes than their mother figures about the status gained through teen pregnancy, they tended to report greater coparenting conflict with their mother figures. Furthermore, greater coparenting conflict was significantly associated with decreases in adolescents' perceptions of social support (i.e., emotional, instrumental, companion support) 1 year later. Findings underscore the importance of incongruent attitudes and the quality of coparenting relationships between adolescent mothers and their mother figures in relation to support processes. Findings are discussed with respect to understanding Mexican‐origin adolescent mothers' social support in the context of family subsystem attitudes and interactions.     

When Father Steps Forward and Mother Steps Back: The Moderating Role of Simultaneity in Parents' Coparenting Behaviors in the Development of Anxiety in 4‐ to 30‐Month‐Olds

Infant negative affectivity predicts child anxiety. Coparenting might influence the development of anxiety by weakening this association in the case of supportive coparenting, or by strengthening this association in the case of undermining coparenting. Parents can display coparenting behaviors simultaneously (both parents being supportive or undermining), or divergently (only one parent being supportive or undermining). In our longitudinal study, we investigated whether coparenting moderated the relation between infant negative affectivity at 4 months and child anxiety symptoms 2 years later. Hundred‐sixteen couples dressed up their firstborn infants in a clothes‐changing task. We coded cooperative, mutual, neutral, and competitive coparenting behaviors. Both parents rated infant negative affectivity and child anxiety symptoms. Infant negative affectivity significantly predicted child anxiety. This association was moderated by parents' divergent cooperative coparenting: It was stronger when mothers were cooperative while fathers were neutral, and weaker when fathers were cooperative while mothers were neutral. When fathers step forward (i.e., being cooperative) and mothers step back (i.e., leaving space), they may protect their at‐risk child from developing anxiety.     

The Impact of Training Videos on Attitudes About Parenting After Divorce

Many U.S. states require divorcing parents to take education classes about the impact of divorce on parents and children. As educators, psychiatrists, social workers, and others create these classes, it is important to evaluate what elements of the curriculum are effective in achieving targeted outcomes. Successful Coparenting After Divorce (https://coparenting.fsu.edu) is a free online divorce education course that focuses on issues such as the emotional impact of divorce, conflict reduction, and skills for parental cooperation. The course also includes videos covering topics including examples of negative and positive parental behavior, and testimonials from children. Pilot testing of the videos and the overall course impact with divorcing parents (n = 218) suggested that the videos’ utility were significantly related to the positive change in parents’ perceptions of their relationship with their former spouse, and their child-focused attitudes. Implications for practitioners who design or provide divorce education to parents are discussed.     

Mother–Grandmother and Mother–Father Coparenting Across Time Among Mexican‐Origin Adolescent Mothers and Their Families

The current study examined mothers' reports of coparenting relationship dynamics (i.e., conflict, communication) within and between mother–father and mother–grandmother subsystems from 10 months postpartum to 5 years postpartum among 178 Mexican‐origin teen mothers (M age = 16.78 years; SD = 1.00). Within subsystems, more frequent mother–father coparenting conflict was associated with less frequent mother–father coparenting communication from 10 months to 5 years postpartum, and more frequent mother–father coparenting communication was associated with less frequent mother–father conflict from 3 to 4 years postpartum. Furthermore, more frequent mother–grandmother coparenting communication was associated with less frequent mother–grandmother conflict from 10 months to 2 years postpartum. Regarding relations across subsystems, more frequent mother–father coparenting conflict was associated with more frequent mother–grandmother conflict from 10 months to 2 years postpartum, as well as from 3 to 4 years postpartum. Findings have implications for future interventions focused on coparenting relationships within the context of adolescent parenthood.     

Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia

Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child‐rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents’ countries of origin for an imagined ‘good childhood‘. I demonstrate that polymedia – SNS and other platforms – sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in transnational parenting. Exploring how families document child‐raising across international boundaries, I show how the trajectories of parenting relationships remain open ended. I counter the predominant focus on transnational parenting as a kind of abandonment attached to left‐behind children. Instead, I refocus the research on the opportunities polymedia give families to create and sustain intimacies, thus making the trajectories of migrant families and children increasingly dynamic. Polymedia create important shifts in global migration – a transformation that requires changes in the way scholars approach transnational families and long‐distance parenting.     

The Longitudinal Influence of Coparenting Conflict on Parental Negativity and Adolescent Maladjustment

This study addresses two limitations of coparenting research: first, little research on coparenting has been conducted with families of adolescents, and second, there is little understanding regarding the child and family contexts in which coparenting is most salient. The longitudinal relation of coparenting conflict to parenting and adolescent maladjustment across 3 years was investigated among 516 2-parent, 2-adolescent families. Coparenting conflict predicted as much or more unique variance in parenting and adolescent adjustment as did marital quality and disagreement together. After controlling for stability, coparenting conflict predicted mothers' and fathers' negativity and adolescent antisocial behavior (but not depression). Importantly, the influence of coparenting conflict in all cases varied as a function of family type, adolescent gender, or initial level of antisocial behavior, or all. The implications of these results for family processes in different relational and developmental contexts are discussed.     

Defining Coparenting for Social Work Practice: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis

Coparenting, referred to as “an enterprise undertaken by two or more adults working together to raise a child for whom they share responsibility,” is responsive to intervention, associated with multiple indicators of individual and family well-being, and applicable to diverse family structures. Because of a lack of conceptual clarity, however, and absence from social work publications, coparenting has not yet entered the purview of social work. In this review, the authors attempt to synthesize existing coparenting definitions into one that is conceptually clear and clinically useful for social work practice with families. Implications for social work practice and research are discussed.     

Multigenerational Punishment: Shared Experiences of Undocumented Immigration Status Within Mixed‐Status Families

Estimates suggest that approximately 16.6 million people in the United States are members of mixed‐status families composed of undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens or documented immigrants. Drawing on interviews with 32 undocumented 1.5‐generation parents, the author explores how immigration laws affect undocumented parents and their citizen children. She finds that U.S. citizen children and their undocumented parents often share in the risks and limitations associated with undocumented immigration status. She conceptualizes this phenomenon as multigenerational punishment, a distinct form of legal violence wherein the sanctions intended for a specific population spill over to negatively affect individuals who are not targeted by laws. Though not restricted to familial relationships, multigenerational punishment tends to occur within families because of the strong social ties, sustained day‐to‐day interactions, and dependent relationships found among family members. This sheds light on how laws can further the reproduction of inequality within families and over generations.     

“Like My Grandparent,But Not”: A Qualitative Investigation of Skip‐Generation Stepgrandchild–Stepgrandparent Relationships

Families have become increasingly diverse and complex, which has made defining family membership more ambiguous. Issues surrounding family identity, belonging, and shared kinship are relevant in many types of complex families, but they are critically important for stepfamilies. In this study the authors examined stepgrandchild–stepgrandparent relationships; specifically, they explored how 27 stepgrandchildren (M age = 20.8) thought and felt about their relationships with 35 skip‐generation stepgrandparents (i.e., stepgrandparents who did not help raise stepgrandchildren's parents but who have been in the lives of stepgrandchildren from birth or early childhood). Most stepgrandchild–stepgrandparent relationships (n = 24/35) were described as emotionally close and supportive. Stepgrandchildren who perceived stepgrandparents as fulfilling traditional grandparent roles and whose parents modeled and facilitated warm, close relationships with stepgrandparents were most likely to perceive these intergenerational steprelationships as important. The findings have implications for kinship identification in diverse and complex families.     

Consequences of Teen Parents' Child‐Care Arrangements for Mothers and Children

Using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (2001–2006; N ?7,900), the authors examined child‐care arrangements among teen parents from birth through prekindergarten. Four latent classes of child care arrangements at 9, 24, and 52 months emerged: (a) “parental care,” (b) “center care,” (c) “paid home‐based care,” and (d) “free kin‐based care.” Disadvantaged teen‐parent families were overrepresented in the “parental care” class, which was negatively associated with children's preschool reading, math, and behavior scores and mothers' socioeconomic and fertility outcomes compared with some nonparental care classes. Nonparental care did not predict any negative maternal or child outcomes, and different care arrangements had different benefits for mothers and children. Time spent in nonparental care and improved maternal outcomes contributed to children's increased scores across domains. Child‐care classes predicted maternal outcomes similarly in teen‐parent and nonteen‐parent families, but the “parental care” class predicted some disproportionately negative child outcomes for teen‐parent families.     

“I'll Give You the World”: Socioeconomic Differences in Parental Support of Adult Children

Research has shown that parents with higher socioeconomic status provide more resources to their children during childhood and adolescence. The authors asked whether similar effects associated with parental socioeconomic position are extended to adult children. Middle‐aged parents (N = 633) from the Family Exchanges Study reported support they provided to their grown children and coresidence with grown children (N = 1,384). Parents with higher income provided more emotional and material support to the average children. Grown children of parents with less education were more likely to coreside with them. Parental resources (e.g., being married) and demands (e.g., family size) explained these patterns. Of interest is that lower income parents provided more total support to all children (except total financial support). Lower income families may experience a double jeopardy; each grown child receives less support on average, but parents exert greater efforts providing more total support to all their children.     

Navigating Parenthood as Two Women; The Positive Aspects and Strengths of Female Same-sex Parenting

This study investigated the positive aspects of female same-sex parenting, and the strengths that these couples may exhibit. We recruited 13 female same-sex couples (n = 26) who participated in in-depth interviews, framed by a hermeneutic approach. Participants described a number of positive factors, which included negotiating a coparenting relationship in the absence of socially prescribed roles, characterized by shared, collaborative parenting. They also described their varying reactions to a heteronormative context, at times advocating for social change in their communities and at other times accepting the social difficulties they face while managing the emotional impact of these for themselves and their children. Their resilience was promoted by the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and queer (GLBTQ) community and by the efforts of organizations such as schools and hospitals to promote inclusion. The findings are helpful for clinicians working to facilitate positive coping in same-sex parents as well as institutions looking to provide sensitive, relevant and inclusive practice to same-sex parents and their children.     

Unsociable Work? Nonstandard Work Schedules,Family Relationships,and Children’s Well‐Being

Many children live in families where one or both parents work evenings, nights, or weekends. Do these work schedules affect family relationships or well‐being? Using cross‐sectional survey data from dual‐earner Canadian families (N= 4,306) with children aged 2 – 11 years (N= 6,156), we compared families where parents worked standard weekday times with those where parents worked nonstandard schedules. Parents working nonstandard schedules reported worse family functioning, more depressive symptoms, and less effective parenting. Their children were also more likely to have social and emotional difficulties, and these associations were partially mediated through family relationships and parent well‐being. For some families, work in the 24‐hour economy may strain the well‐being of parents and children.     

“Phil's Calling Grandma… ”: The Role of External Support in Human–Companion Animal Identity Pairings

This exploratory paper deals with human–animal role identity pairings such as parent–child or sibling–sibling and the necessity of support from other actors both for the formation of these idiosyncratic identities, as well as for their situational placement in social environments not limited to the nonhuman animal. Taken from a qualitative study examining identity formation counter to the nonhuman animal, I use in‐depth interviews of both people with and without human children to demonstrate how human‐to‐human relationships are formed by categorizing the companion animal as a “child” of sorts within the family structure. These relationships prove integral to the continued development and enactment of identities such as the animal “parent” or the animal “sibling” via three different groups: their own parents, partners, and, in one case, adult siblings. This creates positive affect and commitment to the identity across other social situations. Implications of these findings for identity theory and family research are discussed.     

Moving for a ‘better welfare’? The case of transnational Sudanese families

The burgeoning literature on welfare migration, or on the likelihood of migrants moving to countries with more generous welfare states, yields mixed results. In this article, we aim to disentangle what kinds of considerations underlie the decisions that migrants and their families make to address their social protection needs when they move to certain places. We explain how Sudanese extended families, with members scattered across multiple countries, draw on formal and informal institutions to meet their needs for social protection. Through a transnational approach, we analyse the mechanisms guiding the access, circulation and coordination of resources to cover different but related social protection domains. We contribute to current debates on transnational social protection by drawing on the life stories of members of a Sudanese transnational family and by expanding on the concept of ‘resource environment’. We based this article on 14 months of multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork with Sudanese migrants and their families in the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan.     

Implications of Childhood Externalizing Problems for Young Adults

This study uses data from a national sample of married individuals and their offspring to explore the relationships between childhood externalizing problems and adult psychological well‐being, social support, and intimate relationship quality. The results indicate that childhood problems predict lower levels of adult psychological well‐being, kin support, and relationship quality. The relationship between childhood problems and adult intimate relationship quality, and that between childhood problems and later parent‐child relationship quality, is explained after accounting for the reciprocal influences of childhood problems and the quality of teen parent‐child relations. This finding suggests that the best way for parents to prevent and offset their offspring's difficulties is to maintain quality relationships with them.     

Interparental Incongruence in Differential Treatment of Adolescent Siblings: Links With Marital Quality

This study examined longitudinal links between incongruence in mothers’ versus fathers’ differential treatment of adolescent‐age siblings and parents’ marital quality. Multilevel models including 200 families, over four waves, spaced across 6 years tested whether youth perceptions of incongruence in differential intimacy and conflict predicted trajectories of mothers’ and fathers’ reports of marital conflict and satisfaction and vice versa. Analyses showed that changes in interparental incongruence covaried longitudinally with changes in marital quality and that these linkages became stronger over time. These results extend previous cross‐sectional research with younger children and are consistent with theories regarding family alliances and coparenting. Discussion focuses on the reciprocal relations between incongruence in parenting and marital quality as an important aspect of family systems.     

A Social Network Comparison of Low‐Income Black and White Newlywed Couples

Relative to White families, Black families have been described as relying on extended social networks to compensate for other social and economic disadvantages. The presence or absence of supportive social networks should be especially relevant to young couples entering marriage, but to date there has been little effort to describe the social networks of comparable Black and White newlyweds. The current study addressed this gap by drawing on interviews with 57 first‐married newlyweds from low‐income communities to compare the composition and structure of Black and White couples' duocentric social networks. The results indicated that low‐income Black couples entered marriage at a social disadvantage relative to White couples, with more family relationships but fewer positive relationships and fewer sources of emotional support (for wives), fewer connections to married individuals, and fewer shared relationships between spouses. Black couples' relative social disadvantages persisted even when various economic and demographic variables were controlled.     

The Importance of the Coparental Relationship for Nonresident Fathers’ Ties to Children

We examine the importance of the coparental relationship for nonresident fathers’ ties to their children. Using data from Wave 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households, we focus on the link between two dimensions of coparenting, cooperative coparenting and conflict over childrearing, and three dimensions of nonresident father involvement, contact, relationship quality, and responsive fathering. Cooperative coparenting predicts more frequent father‐child contact, which in turn predicts higher relationship quality and more responsive fathering. Conflict over childrearing, however, is not significantly related to nonresident father involvement. Findings are consistent across different groups of children. Results suggest that cooperative coparenting between parents who live apart is associated with stronger ties between nonresident fathers and their children.     

The Longitudinal Influence of Self‐Efficacy,Communication, and Parenting on Spontaneous Adolescent Disclosure

This study involving 463 adolescents examined the impact of parent, teen, and parent–teen interaction processes on spontaneous disclosure to mothers. High openness in communication and stronger disclosure self‐efficacy beliefs were associated with more disclosure at follow‐up. Although a positive relationship was also found for maternal warmth/responsiveness when it was considered together with other parenting attributes, its unique contribution to the disclosure process was attenuated once openness and self‐efficacy beliefs were taken into account. Domain‐specific predictors of disclosure were also explored. Open communication was important for disclosure across all domains, while self‐efficacy beliefs were critical for revealing difficult information. These findings underscore the importance of fostering an open environment in families that nurtures adolescents' confidence to engage in disclosure with parents.