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>>KATYE MILLER: Welcome to our second meeting of
the First Fridays Colloquium, which is sponsored by
the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy,
in our college, the College of Education and Human Ecology.
We are very excited to have Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan with us today,
an Associate professor in human development and family studies,
who is going to talk to us about coparenting.
I'm not privy to the talk so I can't give you any sort of spoilers in advance.
>>DR. SCHOPPE-SULLIVAN: It's a surprise.
[ AUDIENCE LAUGHS ]
>>KATYE MILLER: As we did last month- and we'll be doing this again
next month, hopefully you're on our email list
so you can keep coming, we love seeing everybody here-
Sarah will talk for about forty-five minutes
and then we'll have an opportunity for discussion.
Last time we came together there was a really interesting discussion.
We did have pizza coming, it is a little bit late,
because the government's shutdown.
[ AUDIENCE LAUGHS ]
For reasons we don't understand, but the pizza will
probably show up in about thirty minutes and if your
starving get up and just grab something but
don't do it in mass or it will become chaotic in here.
So, I will turn it over to Sarah then. Thank you.
>>DR. SCHOPPE-SULLIVAN: Ok, thank you so much for
inviting me to speak to you today. I'm really excited to
be talking to you about my research on coparenting and
young children's social and emotional development.
Some research that I've been doing for about the past fifteen years.
So, just to give you a little sense of what I do and how
coparenting fits into all this; my research has three
main areas of focus. The first is on coparenting, which
obviously I'll be talking about today.
Coparenting can be generally defined as: the extent to which parents
cooperate as a team in rearing children.
I also have interest in father-child relationships and
you'll hear a little about that today. I'm particularly
interested in variations in father-child relationships across families.
It turns out that fathers are highly
variable in how involved they are with their children
and what they do in terms of parenting.
So, I'm really interested both in what the implications of those
variations are for children's development, and also why
those variations exist and where they come from;
why some fathers are much more
involved with their children than others are.
And then the third area of focus for me is the transition to parenthood.
So, coparenting and father-child relationships really
develop as parents become parents for the first time over this transition.
So, I've done some research on that big life change.
If anybody here is a parent, you know that
as much as many people or some people try to prepare for it,
it's not something you can entirely prepare for.
The guiding theory or framework for my research is family systems theory.
And according to 'family systems theory',
families consist of interdependent parts or subsystems.
So basically, people can't really be understood
separately from relationship context and family context.
The idea is that people affect each other.
Another principle of family systems theory is this idea
that the family whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
So, as I'm going to be talking to you about it;
I study coparenting which usually involves two parents
and one child. You couldn't know what that's like in a
family just by knowing something about the individuals
in the family or even the father-child relationship and
the mother-child relationship. That the whole of the
family are different levels of the family are something greater.
And also, according to family systems perspective,
family systems reorganize at transitions.
Like the transition to parent hood, when new relationships
or family subsystems are formed.
So, what do I mean by coparenting? Like I said,
coparenting can be roughly defined as the extent to
which parents work as a team cooperate in rearing children,
versus they don't work well together and they
work at crossed purposes to each other.
But to give you a visual here, here's a diagram of a very
oversimplified family system, I know that. Here we have
a mother, father and child. These double headed arrows
here represent the more typically studied dyadic,
or two person relationships in families.
So, here you have the couple relationship between
parents- if they're romantically involved, married,
cohabiting- and mother-child relationship and father-
child relationship. That's what's typically studied in
research and especially in developmental psychology.
What I mean by coparenting is really something more like this.
So, it's really triadic, or a three-person relationship;
the relationship between parents with respect to parenting the child.
So that's what I'm talking about here.
And importantly, according to 'family systems theory'
this coparenting relationship, sometimes called the
"executive subsystem" of the family- so, think about the
board of the corporation or something that's controlling,
leading the family- is very important, is critical to the health and
well being of family members. Especially children.
And also, this is considered to be something different
from just this couple relationship here.
Not just in the sense that coparenting is related to
parenting issues- because you can say, "well, you got the
coparenting issues, and then you've got all the other
couple issues". You've got finances, and sex, and all that
kind of stuff. It's not just that because the idea of
coparenting is really, like I said, that it's triadic, that
you're involving the child. It's not just between the two adults in the family.
So why would I study this? I could give you- I don't have
time to give you the whole personal story of why I find
this interesting- but there are some practical reasons
besides the fact that 'family systems theory' says the
coparenting relationship or executive subsystem is important.
The first point is that most children are
parented by more than one adult at any given time in their lives.
Some would say that I'm a developmental
psychologist by training, that we created the single
parent family long before it really existed. Some would
even argue that- there's certainly lots of children,
I believe it's over forty percent, are born to unmarried
mothers, this is true. But even for unmarried mothers,
about sixty percent of them are living with the child's
father at the time of the child's birth.
So even though their not married, it's not as if there
aren't multiple parental figures in the children's lives.
And also, even though I will say that the research I'm
going to be focusing on today mostly involves married,
male and female parents, coparenting itself is a really
broad concept. It's a really broad idea that can
apply to all different kinds of families.
So, people have studied coparenting between mothers
and grandmothers in families, and also studied
coparenting for gay and lesbian parents, adoptive
parents, and stepparents. There's a huge coparenting
focus in the divorce literature obviously.
So, this is a pretty broad construct.
And so, coparenting really represents a significant
reality for children. Most of them are receiving
parenting by more than one adult at any given time.
And also, there is quite a lot of research, including some
of my own, which suggests that the quality of the
coparenting relationship in the family is critical to the
father's involvement with children.
So, if the coparenting relationship is good, if it's
supportive, and especially if mothers are supportive of
fathers, fathers are more involved with their children.
This is true in families with married parents, but it's
also likely even more true with unmarried parents
because unmarried fathers ties to their children are quite tenuous.
So these are some of the reasons why I focus on the study of coparenting.
Ok so, again, to give you more of an idea of the
components of the coparenting construct. So, what do I
mean by, you know, parents cooperate and they don't
get in each others way, what does that mean? This is
sort of an amalgamation of a couple of different models
of coparenting that researchers have put out.
It's really how I currently think about it. In this model,
this conceptual model, coparenting consists of four components.
The first one is solidarity, and that is really agreement
about child rearing beliefs and values in the
sense that you're growing together as parents,
versus parenthood pushing you further apart.
There are also these two components
:support and undermining. These are really behavioral.
Support has to do with instrumental and emotional support
between partners with respect to parenting, whereas
undermining is the flip side. Undermining is basically
hostile, critical, competitive behavior between partners
with respect to parenting a common child.
Then we also have this component down here, which I
won't have much time to talk about today,
that's division of labor. It's really parents' happiness or
satisfaction with how the child rearing jobs are being divided.
So, it's not just how they're being split up between, in
this case, moms and dads, but how satisfied parents are
with that division. It turns out to be
a very contentious issue for new parents.
So, most of my research has focused on these two
components of coparenting, the supportive and
undermining components, and I said these are very
behavioral and I do a lot of observational research.
So, I'm really interested in stuff that you can see happen.
When you watch parents interact together in parenting their children.
What I typically do in my research, is I take families,
triads, mother-father-child, and I put them in a variety
of structured and semi-structured situations, both at
home and in a lab, and I ask them to
do things together with their child.
Sometimes I ask the parents to just play together with
their child like they normally would if they had some
extra time, and sometimes I ask them to do something a
little bit harder, a little bit more structured or goal-
oriented, like, "Okay, I'd like you to use this building set
together and create a structure together". Or, "We'd like
you to play a game together or draw a picture of your
family together." These are the kinds of things that I've done.
Obviously, with infants you do more like, "Just play with
your baby as you would if you had a few extra minutes."
When kids get older, into the preschool years, we do
more of this goal-oriented kind of stuff.
And then these interactions between moms, dads, and
kids are videotaped and coded for important aspects of
coparenting behavior. In this case, supportive and undermining behavior.
So, some of these important aspects of the behaviors, in
terms of supportive coparenting- to get a high score on
supportive coparenting, we want parents to show
pleasure. And this is not just to be happy in general,
but to show pleasure and appreciation of your partners
relationship with the child. To be attentive and engaged
when your partner is taking the lead, to compliment
your partner on what they're doing with the child.
Those sorts of things.
Warmth: genuine affection and connection between
parents with respect to parenting. Cooperation-
or again this sort of instrumental help and support.
So, if one parent says something to the child, trying to get the
three year old to do something, the other parent says
the same thing, like echoes it, or said,
"Your mom's right", or, "You better do that".
Or just trying to smoothly work together with their child.
And then interactiveness, which is really just engaging
with your partner in the task of parenting the child;
so, responding to what the other person says
and looking at them and so forth.
On the other hand, families that got high scores on
undermining coparenting show behaviors like
displeasure, coldness, anger and competition.
Displeasure is showing dislike or disdain for your
partner's parenting strategies or efforts to work with the child.
Coldness is basically kind of stonewalling, not
responding to your partner is they say something about
the child, or if they make an observation about the child.
Anger, irritation, which we see sometimes in how
annoyed you are in what your partner's doing with the child.
And then, competition, which is, I think one of the most
interesting behaviors, which is when parents either
compete for their child's affection or attention
while in these situations.
So, what I thought I would do is show you some
examples of some families so you can see what this looks like.
The first family I'm going to show you is a family- these
are from an older study now, the videos aren't great
quality but I think you'll be able to see what I'm talking
about- These are families with three year olds, and what
we asked them to do is we asked them to build a
structure together out of Lincoln Logs.
It turns out those are great, because they're really
pretty hard for little kids to use appropriately and
actually hard for lots of adults to use appropriately too.
[ LAUGHS ]
So, it provides some, you know, it brings out a lot of
variability in how the parents manage this coparenting task.
So, the first example, this family that you'll see with
their three year old, they were rated very high on
supportive coparenting on those elements I just showed you.
In this example, the parents draw attention to each
others activities, they support each other- just an
example, the mom says, "Nope, Daddy's right"- and the
parents repeat each other's directions to the child.
I don't know how hard this will be for you to hear but we'll give it a shot.
And I think as a result you see they did a very nice job of
building- in this case it was a playground set,
so we asked them to build a playground together.
Okay, I think I just need to click it.
[ VIDEO PLAYS ] [AUDIO INDISTINGUISHABLE]
Okay, I'm going to cut that
off in terms of time and I know it's hard to hear but
basically they're constantly echoing each other's
recommendations about how to proceed with building the structure.
The mom's taking a little bit more supportive role and
the dad's leading, but they're still interacting with each
other and supporting each other's efforts with the child.
Here's a different example of a very different family.
This is an example of undermining coparenting with a
three year old. Same study, same situation in which the
parents were asked to build a structure together. What
you can see here is that: dad takes over the task and
criticizes mom's efforts, he repeatedly says, "Mommy
did it all backwards", and he continues to criticize mom,
calling her, "building-challenged", and I don't think you
can hear this but by the end, the three year old is calling
her mother "building challenged" as well.
So it's really pretty nasty for what we see in these kinds of observations.
And I do have permission to show these by the way-
[ AUDIENCE LAUGHS ]-in academic presentations.
[ VIDEO PLAYS ] [AUDIO INDISTINGUISHABLE]
It's really hard to hear, he says, "You're building challenged, that's for sure".
Okay, so we go a little later.
They're fighting again over how to do this.
She play hits him.
There she goes, "cause you're building challenged".
And then she says, "Daddy got impatient and had to take over".
So, you get the idea. I don't know if you caught that last exchange,
but the mom said to the child, "Daddy needs a 'doink', doesn't he?",
which means a hit basically, a bonk on the head,
and the child says, "No, you, you need a doink".
Later she actually hits her mom.
Not hard, but you know, we know these are not good things.
So what do these kinds of interactions mean for a child's development?
In an earlier study, one of the early studies I did,
what I was interested in was whether these kinds of different
coparenting interactions in families were related to
children's adjustment, to children's social and emotional adjustment.
In this study- where these videos were from- we had
about sixty family triads and they were studied when
the child was three, that's when the coparenting was assessed,
and one year later when children were four.
We obtained reports of children's social and emotional
adjustment from parents, but also from children's preschool teachers.
And very simply, not surprisingly, this is what we found
:that when parents showed more support of coparenting,
like that first family, when children were three,
by both parent and teacher reports children showed fewer behavior problems,
in particular fewer externalizing or aggressive
acting out behavior problems one year later.
In contrast, when a parent showed more- were more
like the second family and showed higher levels of
undermining coparenting- children showed more
externalizing behavioral problems one year later;
both by parent report and teacher report.
So, that helped to provide some early evidence that
coparenting might be important for children's development.
Some of my own research and subsequent work by
other scholars has really honed in on this idea and
demonstrated that coparenting has unique effects on children.
So, even when controlling for the general quality of
the couple relationship, outside of parenting, controlling for
the quality of mother-child and father-child relationships-
And just very recently my students and I submitted
an abstract to a conference that showed that
even controlling for the infant's temperament,
or sort of inborn, emotional, behavioral tendencies,
that the quality of the coparenting relationship predicted
toddler social and emotional adjustment above and beyond infant temperament.
So it really does seem to be important for children's development,
at least in the ways that we can study this sort of thing.
So, the next question I was interested in was to try to
get more sense of the roll of coparenting in the family system.
I wanted to know in particular whether coparenting moderated
associations between child and family characteristics and child adjustment.
What I mean by this is, does the coparenting environment in
the family strengthen or weaken the relations between
other things that we know effect children's development.
Those kinds of associations.
So, I'm going to talk to you if I have time- we'll see-
about two studies that address this question.
In the first study, this was actually the first study
I conducted at Ohio State when I got here.
I had one hundred family triads, so mother, father, and
a preschool aged child, and I studied them when the child
was age four and again a year later when the child was age five.
We collected a lot of important information from these families,
information about the parent's involvement, mother's and father's involvement,
collected through surveys; information about children's
characteristics from parents and from teachers, and also
these observations of coparenting, an aspect of the family environment.
In this first particular study, what I was interested in
was this child characteristic called "Child Effortful Control".
This is thought to be an aspect of temperament,
or this sort of innate influence by logical tendencies in children,
kind of like the child's inborn personality is how I would describe it.
Effortful control specifically is an aspect of
temperament that has to do with the ability to control
one's emotions and behavior. What we know from a lot
of prior research about this is that children with low
effortful control are at risk. They're at risk for lots of
things, but especially at risk for developing these
externalizing or aggressive acting out behavior problems.
Lots of studies have shown that association.
What I wanted to see was whether the quality of
coparenting behavior in the family could make a difference;
could either strengthen or weaken this association that we know exists.
So, basically this has to do with the role of coparenting
as a moderator of this association.
I know I'm glossing over a lot of details.
I'd be happy to answer questions about
the analysis if anybody has them.
But essentially, we did find that coparenting, specifically
supportive coparenting, served as a moderator.
So let me explain this.
Basically, this was the moderation or interaction effect
that we found. When parents- this redline here with the
triangles- when parents showed low levels of
supportive coparenting when we observed them,
we saw the expected negative association between
effortful control and externalizing behavior over time.
This was externalizing behavior at preschool reported by teachers.
So basically, kids low in effortful control were at risk for
greater relative increases in externalizing behavior one year later.
Just what you'd expect based on prior research.
But, in the case when parents showed high levels of
supportive coparenting, what you can see is that
association was not present. Then effortful control,
whether kids were low or high, was not associated with relative increases
or decreases in externalizing behavior over one year's time.
So we thought this was really promising.
This was probably my favorite finding ever, because usually you
always find that bad things predict bad things, you know,
sometimes that's what I feel like my research always says. [ LAUGHS ]
This was very positive and it suggests that coparenting,
supportive coparenting, could be kind of a buffer in the family.
Sometimes this type of effect from a
risk/resilience perspective is called a 'protective stabilizing effect',
that it might have a protective effect, at least in the short term,
on kids who might be at risk for externalizing behavior problems.
Using data from the same study, the next examination that-
the next question we addressed I should say-
was again about this role of coparenting as a moderator,
but instead of as a moderator between a child characteristic
and child adjustment, as a moderator of the association
between another aspect of the family system and children's adjustment.
In this case we were interested in whether coparenting
moderated the association between father's involvement,
the frequency of father's involvement and play with their
preschool children which is something fathers do a fair amount of.
And we wondered whether the effect of father's involvement in
play on children's adjustment, social, emotional adjustment,
would be moderated by the quality of coparenting in the family.
And why were we thinking this? Well basically I had
done some other research suggesting that father's
involvement was not always positive for families.
It actually sometimes increased conflict between parents.
And so it kind of counterintuitive but I think if you give
it some thought it's not really that counterintuitive you know.
Anytime you got more than one person involved in doing something there is more possibility for
but there is also more possibility for support.
So that lead me to think maybe the father involvement will be,
most likely be to support the child's adjustment in the
context of positive co-parenting relationships.
And there are a lot of findings on that studying but I'm
focusing on the two moderation effects here.
In this case what you can see is that this is just like we expected.
When there was high positive coparenting in the family,
so this is a combination of support and undermining,
high support and low undermining behavior that we observed.
When there is high positive coparenting,
the more fathers played with their preschoolers
the greater the relative decreases over time in the preschooler's internalizing behaviors.
These are things like depressive, withdrawn, anxious behaviors.
But when co-parenting wasn't positive,
you see that there was no association between
how frequently the father played with the child and the child's internalizing behaviors.
So, it seemed in this case that father's who were highly involved in play,
in the context of a positive, supportive coparenting relationship,
the children benefited from that.
We found something similar but a little bit different
with respect to predicting preschooler's social competence.
Again, this was reported by teachers in the preschool classroom.
In the case of high-positive coparenting we found just what you'd think.
When parents were supportive of each other's parenting,
and fathers played more with their preschoolers,
those children showed relatively greater increases in
social competence over a year as reported by teachers.
So again, the combination of high-positive co-parenting
and fathers who are spending a lot of time playing with
their preschoolers seem to yield the best outcomes for children.
We found something a little bit funny with respect to
low-positive coparenting. So in families that showed
more undermining and less supportive co-parenting,
actually the more frequently fathers played with their
children the lower their social competence over one year.
This was interesting because we really expected that to
be flat and not in that direction. But I think there is
some possible explanations for this. One would be
what's going on in the family, where the father is really
doing a lot with the child and the coparenting is poor.
There could be a lot of things going on that we couldn't even observe,
in terms of the parents disparaging each others parenting when they're
alone with the child; which is not something that you can easily
get at in observations, although we do have survey measures to get at that.
Or, it could just be that the effect of the coparenting relationship
is so strong that if there is a lot of conflict and undermining going on
in that relationship it basically cancels out the beneficial
effects of the father's involvement in play.
Okay so hopefully I've convinced you a little bit that
coparenting might be important for child development.
So, let me change gears for a little bit and tell you about my
most recent research in which I've been studying the
development of coparenting relationships.
Like I said I'm interested in the transition to parenthood.
And finding that coparenting might be important for
childhood development and also becoming a parent
myself just made me really, really interested in how coparenting
relationships develop - initially develop before the transition to parenthood.
So I'm probably going to rock your world a little bit with some of this stuff.
[ AUDIENCE LAUGHS ]
I was interested in whether the coparenting relationship
actually starts at development, prior to the child's birth.
We do know that parents develop representations of future
family relationships before the birth of the child; it's not completely crazy.
Or at least that predictors of coparenting relationships
could be identified prior to the child's birth because
the earlier you can identify families that might have
difficulty in the options of coparenting, actually the earlier you could intervene.
And then also an important issue, if you could identify something like
the coparenting relationship even before the child comes on scene.
An important issue would be since there is no actual you know-
at least outside world child yet- the important thing would
be to be sure to distinguish that developing co-parenting
relationship from that preexisting couple relationship.
How could you really make that distinction?
Once the child's born and you're saying it's triadic versus dyadic,
I think it's easier for people to grasp that.
But what if you're just talking about these two people?
Can you get a sense of their coparenting relationship developing
separately from their preexisting couple relationship?
In order to address these questions my colleague
and I embarked on a study, a much larger study,
of parents undergoing the transition to parenthood.
This was called the 'New Parents Project'.
This was funded by the National Science Foundation,
and what we did was we followed duel earner couples
over their first transition into parenthood.
You have to remember what kind of sample this is.
The reason I focused on dual earner couples is because
I thought that- like I said, I'm also interested in father
involvement and I was thinking that these would be
families in which fathers would really need to be involved.
Because these are families in which both parents
were working fulltime prior to the child's birth
and both are at least planning to go back
to work part-time, after the child's birth.
There were four time points of data collection.
We recruited the samples in the third trimester of pregnancy,
and then followed them up at three months, six months,
and nine months postpartum. We used surveys, interviews, and observations.
I'm going to focus on the observations here today.
But we have a lot of data and we're still coding and analyzing it,
which might be going on forever at this point.
I have a lot of recommendations too, so if you're ever wanting to do
a longitudinal study like this I can tell you all the things not to do.
[ AUDIENCE LAUGHS ]
One thing that we used in the New Parents Project-
in order to get this idea of whether coparenting starts to
develop before babies are born is a procedure called the
'Prenatal Lausanne Trilogies Play'. It was actually
developed by researchers at the Center for Family Studies
at the University of Lausanne, which is in Switzerland, right in the Swiss Alps there.
I've been fortunate to go there two times, I would, in a heartbeat
take off and go now [ LAUGHS ] because it's so beautiful.
It's really the most beautiful place I think I've ever seen.
They developed this procedure to try to assess the
development of the coparenting relationship.
As part of the grant that was funded, I was able to go there and be
trained to use this procedure and incorporate it into the
New Parents Project. In the Prenatal Lausanne Trilogies Play,
or LTP as we like to call it, expected parents are asked to
imagine it is the first time they are meeting their baby.
We did this in their homes. We went to them and we said-
we made them do lots of things, but we said,
"Okay, sit down. We're going to have you imagine
it's the first time you're meeting you're new baby."
They're given a doll that has an undefined face and
really hard to define features, not applying any racial
background or gender. You'll see it on the video in a little bit.
They were asked to play together with the baby in four parts.
First one parent plays with the baby. Then the other parent plays with the baby.
Then both play together with the baby. Then they're asked
to let the baby go to sleep in it's cute little basket
and talk together about their experience.
Studies in Europe have shown that how parents interact
in this prenatal observation predicts elements of family
interaction all the way up to child age five.
So, that was why- it wasn't just I thought it was neat,
that was part of the reason why I thought it
would be fruitful to include in the New Parents Project.
Nobody had ever used it in the U.S. before.
Here's an example. This is a family that- actually this is
on our website, I'll show you a link at the end if you
want to look at some of the other videos from the
New Parents Project. One of my undergraduate students got
a grant to create a video website about the
observational methods in the New Parent Project.-
So, this is a family that's so cute, basically we asked them
special permission to put their video on our website.
They are really, really cute. It's cut a little bit,
so it's pretty short, but you'll get the idea.
[ VIDEO PLAYS ] [AUDIO INDISTINGUISHABLE]
I just love these people; I want to be in their family.
So, this is obviously the best-case scenario of what this kind of
interaction looks like. You'll get to see a different perspective in a second.
So, these are videotaped and coded and what the coders
look for are Cooperation-how well the expected parents
work together and figure out who plays first and
moving smoothly between the episodes of the prenatal assessment.
Playfulness, which is basically being able to realize that this is silly,
but not taking it too seriously or laughing so much you
can't even do it. Doing it in kind of a whimsical, playful way,
but where you're actually engaged in the task.
Family Warmth, basically you saw a lot of warmth,
here in affection between partners. Also, we look at Intuitive
Parenting Behavior, which you saw a lot of here,
which is basically holding the doll at dialogue distance,
exploring the baby's body, talking to the baby-
like she pinches the baby's body fat at one point.
They treat this doll very much like a real baby.
This is what the coders look for in terms of prenatal coparenting
whether this was developed prior to the birth of the child.
And then, in the New Parents Project- we're going way
ahead to the last assessment here so I can tell you about
one more study- at nine months postpartum, when the
infant's nine months old, we asked the parents to
interact with their real baby, to introduce a new toy to
them together like one of the kinds of tasks I've already
talked about, and those were coded for supportive and undermining coparenting.
So, obviously what I'm trying to do here is tell you about one little piece of this.
So, in an article that's under review, what we did,
structural equation modeling- like I said if you want
details I will be happy to provide them, this is obviously
a massive oversimplification- but basically what we did
is we looked at whether the prenatal coparenting behavior,
in that situation with the doll, predicted about a year later,
the supportive and undermining behavior we saw in parents with their real child.
We found that prenatal coparenting behavior did
in fact predict- better or higher quality prenatal
coparenting behavior- predicted greater supportive and
less undermining coparenting a whole year later with a real baby.
We also importantly controlled for another assessment,
another measure which I couldn't show you,
which was observed couple behavior.
So, those couples who were playing with the fake baby,
we also asked them in a separate observation, that same day,
to discuss a contentious issue in their couple relationship
and those were coded for the quality of the couple relationship.
So, what's interesting is you can see that the prenatal
coparenting behavior predicted over and above the observed couple behavior,
although the observed couple behavior was also related,
which you'd expect from a family systems perspective, which also predicted
greater supportive and less undermining coparenting a whole year later.
We also included and controlled for measures of
parent's perceptions of their couple relationship.
Their marital or couple satisfaction, how much they reported
that they fought with each other and so forth.
Those were not significantly associated with co-parenting
behavior at nine months postpartum.
Okay, so the last thing I really want to show you-
I think we're almost done so that's perfect.
I thought to really hit this home, to get this to hit home for you,
I would show you an example of a family from the New Parent Project
doing that prenatal LTP with baby and then introducing their
nine month old to a toy together, so you can see the same family over time.
So, since you saw the really cute example of very high
quality prenatal parenting, I now have an example of
very poor quality prenatal parenting. What you will see-
don't feel bad if you think this would have been you.
I was very worried when I introduced this playing with the doll
situation to American parents that they would think it was ridiculous.
That's actually not true, on the whole. But this couple-they clearly do.
The expectant parents cannot engage in the task,
they look awkward, they show relatively low levels of intuitive parenting,
like the mom throws the baby to the dad. And they show
pretty low levels of genuine family warmth. They're laughing a lot,
but it's because they're embarrassed and they think it's goofy,
and they don't show true warmth and affection to each other.
[ VIDEO PLAYS ]
I mean, it's just funny.
Anyway, you get the idea.
They're very different from the first family we saw.
So, fast-forward to nine months. At nine months, they also showed
poor real-life coparenting with their nine month-old infant.
What you'll see is the parents working with their child independently.
They're introducing their child to this new toy, which is a jack-in-the-box.
But they're not really cooperating or working together.
And they show displeasure towards each other's parenting.
You'll hear the mother say, "You're not giving him a chance to explore it."
And they show competition, so they kind of fight over who gets
to use the toy with the child and at the end you'll see them
physically pull on it-when you think about it, it's kind of strange actually.
He's got this black box on because I realized
that he wore an identifiable t-shirt, so I blocked that.
[ VIDEO PLAYS ]
He says: "Here take your turn."
A lot of parents that are more supportive will do it together;
they'll hold it together, whereas they're taking turns here, which is okay.
She thinks he comes out and Dad doesn't really
respond... Too late now, she kind of whacked him there.
They were fighting over the jack-in-the-box.
Okay. So we're at the end here, and I'm out of time.
So, what should you conclude from my presentation today?
I think first that coparenting matters. That we have evidence
that this is an important aspect of families for children's development,
in particular social emotional developments.
And coparenting does not only have direct associations
with children's adjustment, but it also may serve as a buffer,
in terms of strengthening or weakening effects of other
child and family characteristics on children's adjustment.
And we also have some evidence that coparenting
develops prior to a child's birth, or at least that we can
identify predictors of coparenting that are present prior
to the child's birth.
Thank you very much.