UC Berkeley

Parenting is an intricate matter influenced by multiple processes and elements within the family. Drawing from the earlier work, I this study aims to examine the effects of supportive couple relationships on mothers’ ability to engage in competent parenting, which helps promote children’s self-regulation development conducted comparative path analysis with a sample of 335 mothers drawn from a larger study of families of first- and second-grade children in public elementary schools in an urban school district in Northern California (n=130) and in the Tokyo metropolitan area (n=157) and 58 teachers (38 teachers in the United States, 20 teachers in Japan),. The results indicated a consistency in the association between mothers’ satisfaction in couple relationships and their parenting competence across groups in both the United States and Japan. The result also indicated the uniqueness in the couple relationship-parenting competence link across the two nations, especially in terms of the domains of parenting vulnerable to couple relationship quality and its effects upon parenting self-efficacy. The benefits that supportive couple relationships project onto child rearing may be a universal feature of family life. Nevertheless, the values and practices specific to various cultural models of parenting determine which domains of parenting are vulnerable to the quality of couple relationships.

The purpose of the present research is to uncover the cross-national generalizability and differences of the psychological process that links supportive couple to mothers’ psychological well-being and parenting competence.