Abstract

PIP: In this study, questions were addressed concerning the intergenerational transmission of parent-child relationships in couples going through the transition to parenthood. During the 2nd trimester of their 1st pregnancy, 38 couples provided information concerning experiences of parenting in their family of origin, then were reinterviewed and observed interacting with their infants at 3 months postpartum. It was expected that when these young adults had reported prenatally better parenting by their parents on specific parenting variables, they in turn would experience early parenthood more adaptively and would show better parenting with their own infants. The analyses suggest that women's reports in interviews of their delight in their child, their investment in their child, their sensitivity to the child's needs, and their acceptance of the child--construed as a factor to represent quality of adaptation to parenting--were significantly predicted by their perception of their own mother's intrusiveness, the support they received from their fathers during adolescence, the sensitivity of their fathers, and, lastly, the subject mother's level of psychological health. Although individual psychological health added some prediction of maternal adaptation to parenting over and above that provided by the family of origin variables, neither psychological health nor marital competence seemed to mediate the relationship between family of origin variables and mother's adaptation to parenthood. For men, adaptation to parenthood was predicted powerfully by the perception of their father's intrusiveness and further predicted by the quality of their current marriage. Thus the quality of their marriage added to but did not replace the predictiveness of the family of origin variable.