Abstract
Children's exposure to coparenting conflict has important implications for their developmental functioning, yet limited work has focused on such processes in families with diverse structures or ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds. This longitudinal study examined the processes by which Mexican-origin adolescent mothers' coparenting conflict with their 3-year-old children's grandmothers and biological fathers (N = 133 families) were linked to children's academic and social skills at 5 years of age, and whether children's effortful control at 4 years of age mediated the link between coparenting conflict and indices of children's academic readiness. Findings revealed that adolescent mothers' coparenting conflict with their child's biological father was linked to indices of children's academic and social school readiness through children's effortful control among girls, but not boys, whereas conflict with grandmothers was directly linked to boys' and girls' social functioning 2 years later. Findings offer information about different mechanisms by which multiple coparenting units in families of adolescent mothers are related to their children's outcomes, and this work has important implications for practitioners working with families of adolescent mothers.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 462-476 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Family Process |
Volume | 57 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2018 |
Keywords
- Academic Readiness
- Adolescent Mothers
- Coparenting Conflict
- Effortful Control
- Self-Regulation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Clinical Psychology
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)