Associations Between Partner Violence, Parenting, and Children’s Adjustment: A Dyadic Framework

To date, our knowledge of the effects of exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) on children’s functioning via parenting have relied on individual approaches, effectively placing parents outside of a relationship context, and greatly neglecting to incorporate fathers. The present study addresses these gaps by utilizing a dyadic model to assess how mothers’ and fathers’ psychological and physical IPV perpetration in early childhood (age 5 years) predicts both their own and each other’s parenting in midchildhood (age 7 years) and, in turn, children’s social and scholastic competence in late childhood (ages 11–12 years). Such models reflect the current consensus that bidirectional IPV is the most common pattern among couples. The present study involved 175 children (87 females) of 105 mothers and 102 fathers who were originally in the Oregon Youth Study (OYS, N = 206). Simple mediation results suggest maternal involvement in parenting is an important mediational mechanism for the relation between maternal IPV as a perpetrator and victim and childhood competencies. Similarly, father’s involvement with parenting served as a mediational mechanism for social competence but only for his own IPV perpetration. Dyadic actor–partner models with maternal and paternal parenting yielded few significant mediational pathways, which is likely partially due to strong shared variance across partners in both IPV and parenting, leaving little unique variance.