Childhood Experience, Conceptions of Parenting, and Attitudes of Spouse as Determinants of Parental Behavior

A model was developed regarding direct and indirect effects of socialization and spousal attitudes upon the supportive parenting and harsh discipline of husbands and wives. The data used to test the model were collected as part of the 1st two wawes of the Iowa Youth and Families Project, a longitudinal study of 451 two-parent families living in the Midwest. As hypothesized, quality of parenting received as a child, satisfaction with the parent-child relationship, education, and various parenting beliefs predicted the parenting practices of both mothers and fathers. As expected, wives' parenting beliefs and degree of satisfaction with the child influenced the quality of parenting of their husbands, whereas the reverse was not the case.