Alongitudinal Investigation of Mothers
KARI ADAMSONSPH.D.,* A LONGITUDINAL INVESTIGATION OF MOTHERS’ AND FATHERS’ INITIAL FATHERING IDENTITIES AND LATER FATHER-CHILD RELATIONSHIP QUALITY Children benefit from high quality relationships with their fathers in a number of ways. However, little is known about the origins of father-child relationships. Here, identity theory and data from the Fragile Families dataset are used to investigate as- sociations between mothers’ and fathers’ fathering identities at the time of the child’s birth and nine years later, and the father-child relationship as reported by children at age nine. Neither mothers’ nor fathers’ role identity standards at birth were as- sociated with father-child relationship quality, but greater father status centrality and not having considered abortion were associated with better father-child rela- tionships. The association between abortion consideration and relationship quality was mediated by whether parents were romantically involved at Year 9. Implica- tions for theory, policy, and practice are discussed. Keywords: father-child relationships, identity theory, father identity, fatherhood It has been well-established that positive fathering behaviors have extensive benefits for children (Lamb, 2010). However, more research has been conducted regarding the out- comes resulting from various forms of father involvement (Hofferth, Pleck, Stueve, Bianchi, & Sayer, 2002; Marsiglio, Amato, Day, & Lamb, 2000; Marsiglio & Cohan, 2000; Pleck, 1997) than the benefits or predictors of relationships between fathers and their children. This largely has been due to the difficulty of defining and modeling a concept such as fa- ther-child relationships in contextually and developmentally appropriate ways (Palkovitz, 2007). Extant research suggests that relationships with fathers are important to children, af- fecting outcomes in childhood as well as into adulthood (Harper & Fine, 2006; Mallers, * University of Connecticut.
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