Quality of parenting and contextual characteristics in a sample of South-Italian mothers

The main purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of family functioning, quality of partner relationships and daily difficulties on parenting practices in a cultural perspective. Data were derived from a two-year longitudinal study in which a total of 104 mothers participated at T1 (two-age children) and 40 completed assessment at T1 and T2 (four-age children). Mothers were administered: the Child Rearing Practices Report (Block, 1965) to assess some parental practices, as restriction or punishment; the McMaster Family Assessment Device (Epstein et al., 1983) to assess some dimensions of family functioning, such as communication and affective responsiveness; the Parenting Daily Hassles (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990) to evaluate challenging and tasks concerning daily difficulties; the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976) to evaluate the quality of partner relationship. Results showed that at T1 challenging and tasks concerning daily difficulties seem to predict lack of affection, restriction and reject in mother-child relation. At T1, quality of partner relationship also seems to influence parenting: more the mothers are satisfied by their marital relationship less they are restrictive with their children. As regards longitudinal results, it was found that family affective responsiveness at T1 predicted less mothers restriction and punishment at T2 and that family ability to solve problems at T1 predicted maternal encouragement of independence at T2. Surprisingly, a good family functioning at T1 predicted maternal punishment at T2, suggesting as shown elsewhere (Lo Coco et al., 2007) the controversial meaning that punishment orientation might acquire in the Italian context.