Childrearing history, marital quality, and maternal affect: Intergenerational transmission in a low-risk sample

Abstract

In order to test the hypothesis that the relation between childrearing history and parental behavior varies as a function of marital quality, retrospectively reported childrearing histories obtained from 92 middle- and working-class mothers-to-be in the last trimester of pregnancy were used to predict maternal positive and negative affect when children were 3-years-old. As anticipated on the basis of findings from high-risk samples, the intergenerational transmission process appeared to vary as a function of marital quality, with problematic histories predicting negative maternal affect when marriages were less positive/more negative and supportive histories predicting positive maternal affect when marriages were more positive/less negative. Unanticipated results also revealed that reports of supportiveandrejecting parenting in childhood were associated with low-negative maternal affect when marriages were of high quality. These findings were interpreted in terms of buffering and gatekeeping processes, whereby marital quality defines both conditions of continuity and discontinuity with respect to the intergenerational transmission of parenting. Follow-up analyses revealed that physical attractiveness might determine which women with more problematic childrearing histories end up in more positive/less negative marriages that function protectively with respect to the intergenerational transmission of parenting. These results are particularly relevant to the study of developmental psychopathology not only by revealing risk and protective factors, but also by showing that processes at work in high-risk samples also seem to function under lower risk conditions.