The Importance of Parenting and Financial Contributions in Promoting Fathers' Psychological Health

This study explores the relationship between residential, biological fathers' parental engagement, financial contributions, and psychological well-being in 2-parent families. Specifically, this study focuses on how fathers' parental engagement and financial contributions are related to their self-esteem, self-efficacy, and psychological distress. Analyses utilize data from the first 2 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics' Child Development Supplement and employ a subsample of father-child pairs (N = 771). The most consistent finding was that fathers' engagement in parenting and financial contributions to the family predicted improvements in fathers' psychological well-being. On the other hand, the results found very limited support for the more common proposition that healthy psychological functioning promotes increases in fathers' parental engagement and financial contributions. Key Words: father-child relations, fatherhood, multiple roles, well-being. Parents and their children develop within a complex web of relationships. According to family systems theory, family relationships do not only impact children; rather, members of the system exist together in bidirectional relationships with complicated interdependent developmental processes (Minuchin, 1985; Parke & Buriel, 1998). Individuals bring characteristics and patterns of behaviors to family relationships and roles, and, in turn, family experiences influence the development of individual behaviors and characteristics. Family systems theory has thus provided a valuable perspective for studying the lives of men within the family context. In spite of this, current research on father involvement has only narrowly attempted to understand and explain such complex relationships. Much of the fathering research has focused on the effects of father involvement on child (Cabrera, Fitzgerald, Bradley, & Roggman, 2007; Marsiglio, Amato, Day, & Lamb, 2000; Pleck & Masciadrelli, 2003) and maternal (Dunn, 2004) outcomes. Research to date has only just begun to consider another key question: How do parenting roles affect fathers? The present study aims to address this question by examining how parental engagement is related to changes in men's psychological wellbeing. Because the provider role has long been salient in men's lives and may compete with the parenting role, this study simultaneously examines how fathers' financial contributions are related to changes in men's psychological well-being. Finally, following family systems theory, this study assesses how fathers' psychological well-being predicts changes in fathering behaviors. Three measures of psychological well-being are considered: self-efficacy, self-esteem, and psychological distress. Because the fathering role has undergone significant transitions in recent decades with an increase in mothers' labor force participation and a greater emphasis on coparenting and fathers' parental involvement (Cabrera, TamisLeMonda, Bradley, Hofferth, & Lamb, 2000), men may face difficult decisions regarding conflicting family roles, making a study of psychological consequences especially relevant. Understanding these relationships is crucial for extending our knowledge of the complicated processes that exist in the formation and development of the family system. Furthermore, promoting the psychological well-being of men is important for fostering healthy child development and improving the overall welfare of society. Conceptual Framework Lamb, Pleck, Levine, and Charnov (1985) proposed a construct of father involvement that dominated scholarship in the 1 990s and emphasized the importance of parental engagement, accessibility, and responsibility. The present study emphasizes two of these components: the importance of fathers' parental engagement and responsibility in the form of financial contributions. Parental engagement has continued to be a focus of father involvement research and has been shown to be important for child development. …