Interparental Relations, Maternal Employment, and Fathering in Mexican American Families.

This study examined independent and interactive relations between the interparental relationship and maternal employment in predicting fathering within low-income, Mexican American two-parent families (N = 115). Interparental conflict was negatively related to quality fathering, and these relations were noted only for single-earner families. The parenting alliance was positively related to quality fathering irrespective of maternal employment. Fathering was associated with lower levels of child depression and conduct problems. Results suggest that bolstering quality fathering is a useful avenue for improving child well-being and that strengthening the interparental relationship can support quality fathering and child mental health within Mexican American families. Key Words: child adjustment, family conflict, father-child relations, low-income families, maternal employment, Mexican Americans. Paternal involvement and parenting are associated with positive socioemotional development (Amato, 1998) and lower rates of child internalizing and externalizing problems (Phares, 1996). Although recent studies have shown that Latino men are involved in child care and have strong, positive relationships with their children (Hofferth, 2003; Toth & Xu, 1999), research on paternal influences on child development within Mexican American families is virtually nonexistent. This gap is problematic because Mexican Americans are one of the largest and poorest U.S. ethnic groups (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2000), and lowincome Mexican American children are at increased risk relative to their European American peers for problem outcomes, including depression, antisocial behavior, and school failure (BrooksGunn & Duncan, 1997; Roberts, Roberts, & Chen, 1997). Thus, quality fathering may be an important, overlooked resource for reducing problem outcomes for low-income Mexican American youth. Mexican Americans, particularly immigrants and monolingual Spanish speakers, are more likely than European Americans to be economically disadvantaged, despite higher rates of marriage and paternal and maternal employment than other low-income groups (Mendoza, 1994). As a result, low-income, Mexican American parents must strike a balance between culturally based attitudes defining men's role as provider and women's role as child caretakers with economic conditions that make maternal employment a necessity for the economic survival of their families. An understanding of how low-income, Mexican American fathers respond to interparental relationship difficulties and economic pressures that challenge traditional work and family roles is thus important to inform culturally sensitive marital and parenting interventions. THE INTERPARENTAL RELATIONSHIP AND MATERNAL EMPLOYMENT AS CONTEXTS FOR QUALITY FATHERING Guided by a family systems perspective, this study examined how the role-based behavior of an individual family member (i.e., the father) is linked to family dynamics and the ways in which interparental relationship quality can spillover into the parent-child relationship (Erel & Burman, 1995). Interparental conflict can drain the emotional resources necessary for parents to remain actively involved in parenting and can result in the spillover of interparental tensions into the parent-child relationship (Cummings & Davies, 1994). Interparental conflict, family conflict, and conflict over childrearing have been linked to decreased family cohesion and poorer parenting for Latino parent dyads (Gonzales, Pitts, Hill, & Roosa, 2000; Lindahl & Malik, 1999), but these links were not examined specifically for fathers. The one study that examined interparental conflict-parenting links with Mexican American fathers found no relation for hostile parenting (Parke et al., 2004). Men in conflictual relationships may disengage from both their wives and their children (Belsky, Rovine, & Fish, 1989), and it may be that some fathers respond to interparental conflict by withdrawing from parenting (e. …