title: The comparison and interdependence of maternal and paternal influences on young children's behavior and resilience.
abstract: We investigated how mothers' and fathers' depressed mood and father-child and mother-child relationship predicted preschool children's problem behavior. The sample was 11,286 continuously intact, two-parent biological families of the United Kingdom's Millennium Cohort Study. We found that mother-child relationship and maternal depressed mood had larger effects on children's problem behavior than father-child relationship and paternal depressed mood. The effect of paternal depressed mood was completely mediated by quality of father-child relationship. There were significant moderator effects but only on internalizing problems. There was little evidence to suggest that, among children of this developmental stage, quality of father-child relationship buffers the effect of contextual risk (i.e., promotes resilience). Quality of mother-child relationship, in contrast, buffered the effect of socioeconomic disadvantage but only on emotional symptoms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PY, United Kingdom. lars-erik.malmberg@ education.ox.ac.uk
authors.forename: Lars-Erik
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Malmberg
authors.forename: Eirini
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Flouri
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology; D005219:Father-Child Relations; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011581:Psychological Tests; D055500:Resilience, Psychological; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D006113:United Kingdom