Coparenting and child anxiety

This thesis investigated the associations between child anxiety and coparenting. Coparenting is usually defined as the ways parents cooperate in their role as parents; this means that coparenting specifically concerns the relationship and collaboration between two parents while they are parenting. Supportive coparenting entails the reinforcement of the partner’s parenting, whereas undermining coparenting entails criticism on the partner’s parenting. Fathers, mothers and their firstborn child participated in a longitudinal study with repeated measurements when children were 4 months, 1 year, 2.5 years and 4.5 years old. The findings of the current thesis provide evidence for a relationship between coparenting and child anxiety: high levels of undermining coparenting related to higher levels of child anxiety. In addition, we found some evidence that undermining coparenting was related to more later child anxiety only in families with a highly anxious parents. We also found that fathers’ coparenting behaviors, rather than mothers’ coparenting behaviors, are more strongly related to decreases in child anxiety. To conclude, we found that indeed, coparenting and child anxiety are related and that parental anxiety plays a role in this association.