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. 2018;27(7):2315-2327.
doi: 10.1007/s10826-018-1059-7. Epub 2018 Mar 22.

Socio-demographic Correlates of Fathers' and Mothers' Parenting Behaviors

Jacobien Van Holland De Graaf  1 , Marcel Hoogenboom  2 , Simone De Roos  3 , Freek Bucx  3
Affiliations

Socio-demographic Correlates of Fathers' and Mothers' Parenting Behaviors

Jacobien Van Holland De Graaf et al. J Child Fam Stud. 2018.

Abstract

In the present study, we investigated whether fathers' and mothers' parenting behavior is differentially related to parental factors (such as age and employment), child factors (age and gender) as well as social support. Parents reported on their use of a broad range of parenting behaviors, including affection, responsivity, explaining, autonomy, support, rewarding, and punishing. We used survey data from the Netherlands for 1197 mothers and 903 fathers of children aged 2 to 17. Seemingly unrelated regression analyses were conducted to combine the regression results on the separate subsamples (fathers and mothers) and to test for differences in the coefficients between those subsamples. Our expectation that the parenting behavior of fathers is more dependent on parents' characteristics, children's characteristics, and social support than that of mothers was only partly confirmed by the results of our analysis. In general, our results suggest that fathers' parenting behaviors seem to be associated with parental and child characteristics and contextual factors in ways that are similar to how these factors are associated with mothers' parenting behaviors. Results are discussed in relation to the roles and expectations associated with motherhood and fatherhood.

Keywords: Control; Fathers; Mothers; Parenting behavior; Support.

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Conflict of interest statement

Compliance with Ethical StandardsThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its subsequent amendments or comparable ethical standards. The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) provided IRB approval for the study.Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants in the study.

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