Single mothers by choice: Parenting and child adjustment in middle childhood.

Procedure

Researchers trained in the study techniques visited the families in their homes throughout the United Kingdom. Written informed consent for the mothers and children to participate in the investigation was obtained from the mothers, and the children gave verbal assent. Ethical approval for the study was granted by the University of Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee. The mothers were administered a standardized interview that was audio recorded. The mothers and children also completed standardized questionnaires and participated together in a video-recorded observational task that lasted approximately 10 min. Following written permission from the mothers, the children’s teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire to give an independent assessment of the children’s adjustment. The teachers were assured that their responses to the questionnaire would not be reported back to the child’s family or school, and written informed consent was obtained from the teachers. As data were obtained by interview on issues relating to the children’s families, it was not possible for the researchers to be “blind” to family type. However, the section of the interview on the children’s emotional and behavioral problems was rated by a child psychiatrist who was unaware of the children’s family type.

Parental acceptance

The 24-item short form of the Parental Acceptance and Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ; Rohner & Khaleque, 2005 ) was administered to mothers and children separately to provide total scores of parental acceptance/rejection comprising the subscales of warmth/affection, hostility/aggression, indifference/neglect, and undifferentiated rejection. The mothers completed the questionnaire regarding their feelings toward their children, and the children completed the questionnaire regarding their perceptions of their mothers’ feelings toward them. Higher scores represent greater rejection and lower scores represent greater acceptance, with scores above 60 representing higher levels of rejection than acceptance. A meta-analysis of the reliability of the PARQ ( Khaleque & Rohner, 2002 ) utilized data from 51 studies worldwide and found that internal consistency exceeded .70 in all groups studied. Convergent and discriminant validity have also been demonstrated ( Rohner & Khaleque, 2005 ). In the current study, the PARQ showed high internal consistency (α = .77 for mothers and α = .88 for children).

Parent-child interaction

The Etch-A-Sketch task ( Stevenson-Hinde & Shouldice, 1995 ) was used to obtain an observational assessment of the quality of interaction between the mother and child. The Etch-A-Sketch is a drawing tool with two dials that allow one person to draw vertically and the other to draw horizontally. The mother and child were asked to copy a picture of a boat, each using one dial only, with clear instructions not to use the other dial. The sessions were video-recorded and scored using the Parent Child Interaction Rating Coding Scheme (PARCHISY: Deater-Deckard & Petrill, 2004 ) by a researcher who was blind to family type to assess the construct of mutuality; that is, the extent to which the mother and child engaged in positive dyadic interaction characterized by warmth, mutual responsiveness, and cooperation. The following variables were rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 ( no instances ) to 7 ( constant, throughout the interaction ): (a) child’s responsiveness to mother assessed the extent to which the child responded immediately and contingently to the mother’s comments, questions or behaviors; (b) mother’s responsiveness to child assessed the extent to which the mother responded immediately and contingently to the child’s comments, questions or behaviors; (c) dyadic reciprocity assessed the degree to which the dyad showed shared positive affect, eye-contact and a ‘turn-taking’ (conversation like) quality of interaction; and (d) dyadic cooperation assessed the degree of agreement about whether and how to complete the task. The interrater reliabilities (intraclass correlation coefficients) were as follows: mother responsiveness (.87), child responsiveness (.83), dyadic reciprocity (.70) and dyadic cooperation (.68).

Maternal mental health

The Trait Anxiety Inventory (TAI: Spielberger, 1983 ), the Edinburgh Depression Scale (EDS: Thorpe, 1993 ) and the short form of the Parenting Stress Index (PSI: Abidin, 1990 ) were completed by mothers to assess anxiety, depression and stress associated with parenting, respectively. Each of these instruments, for which higher scores represent greater difficulties, has been shown to have good reliability and to discriminate well between clinical and nonclinical groups. In the present study, all three scales showed excellent internal consistency (EDS α = .86; TAI α = .91; PSI α = .90).

Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire

The presence of child adjustment problems was assessed with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ: Goodman, 2001 ) administered to mothers. This questionnaire asks parents to reflect on their child’s behavior over the past 6 months and rate whether an item is not true, somewhat true, or certainly true for their child. The SDQ produces a total score of children’s adjustment difficulties, with scores of 14 or above classified as indicative of psychiatric disorder. An independent assessment of the children’s psychological adjustment was obtained from teachers. For teachers’ questionnaires, scores of 12 or above are classified as indicative of psychiatric disorder.

The SDQ has been shown to have good internal consistency, test-retest and interrater reliability, and concurrent and discriminative validity ( Goodman, 2001 ). For example, based on an epidemiological sample of more than 10,000 children in the U.K. ( Goodman, 2001 ), internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) was found to be 0.73, test–retest reliability after 4–6 months was 0.62 and, in terms of validity, scores above the 90th centile predicted a substantially raised probability of independently diagnosed psychiatric disorders. In a review of the reliability and validity of the SDQ based upon 48 studies involving more than 130,000 children, Stone, Otten, Engels, Vermulst, & Janssens (2010) found the psychometric properties of the SDQ to be strong. Internal consistencies for mothers and teachers, respectively, in the current study were α = .86 and α = .83.

Ratings of psychiatric disorder

The presence of child psychiatric disorder was assessed during the interview with the mother using a standardized procedure ( Rutter, Cox, Tupling, Berger, & Yule, 1975 ). Detailed descriptions were obtained of any emotional, behavioral, or developmental problems shown by the child. These descriptions of actual behavior, which included information about where the behavior was shown, severity of the behavior, frequency, precipitants, and course of the behavior over the past year, were transcribed verbatim and rated by a child psychiatrist who was unaware of the nature of the study. A high level of reliability ( r = .85) between ratings made by social scientists and those made “blindly” by a child psychiatrist has been demonstrated for this procedure, and validity has been established through a high level of agreement between interview ratings of children’s psychological problems and mothers’ assessments of whether or not their children had emotional or behavioral difficulties ( Rutter et al., 1975 ). Psychiatric disorder, when identified, was rated according to severity on a 3-point scale ranging from 0 ( no disorder ), 1 ( slight but definite ) to 2 ( definite or marked ), and type (emotional disorder, conduct disorder, mixed emotional and conduct disorder, developmental disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, psychotic disorder, and other disorder).

Analysis Plan

Prior to addressing the research questions, we established that the factor structure of the parenting interview variables at Phase 1 was replicated at Phase 2 using principal components analysis. Two factors, with a mean factor loading of 0.73, explained 58.64% of the variance. The first factor, reflecting positive parenting, explained 35.21% of the variance and included expressed warmth (0.67), mother-to-child warmth (0.89), child-to-mother warmth (0.78), mother’s enjoyment of play (0.68), amount of interaction (0.80) and quality of interaction (0.68). The second factor, reflecting negative parenting, explained 23.43% of the variance, and included conflict (0.82), frequency of battles (0.78), level of battles (0.46) and criticism (0.74). The factor loadings at Phase 2 were similar to those of Phase 1: expressed warmth (0.74), mother-to-child warmth (0.73), child-to-mother warmth (0.62), mother’s enjoyment of play (0.62), amount of interaction (0.66), quality of interaction (0.66), conflict (0.83), frequency of battles (0.70), level of battles (0.63) and criticism (0.62).

Following this, we used MANCOVAs to examine whether there were group differences between single mother versus two-parent families in terms of the quality of mother-child relationships, maternal mental health and child adjustment. For each MANCOVA, we covaried the demographic variables that differed by family type, that is, parent age and number of siblings. Next, we used partial correlations to explore associations between the family process and child adjustment variables while controlling for prior levels of the variables at Phase 1. We then built a linear regression model in Mplus ( Muthén & Muthén, 2012 ) to examine the independent contribution of the Phase 2 family process variables on child adjustment scores, over and above the stability of child adjustment scores from Phase 1. A full information approach was used so that all cases with data at either time point could be used in the analyses. This approach is suitable for regression models and produces less biased estimates than traditional missing data handling procedures ( Enders, 2001 ).

Child Adjustment

An ANCOVA was carried out for children’s SDQ scores as rated by mothers, with family type (one-parent vs. two-parent) as a between-subjects factor, and parent age and number of siblings as covariates. The analysis showed no difference in child adjustment between family types, F (1, 76) = .03, p = .875, η 2 = .00.

In light of the teachers’ response rate (70% of the children had teacher questionnaires), a separate ANCOVA, with family type (one-parent vs. two-parent) as a between-subjects factor, and parent age and number of siblings as covariates, was conducted for the teachers’ SDQ scores. The analysis showed a significant but modest group difference in child adjustment, F (1, 53) = 4.28, p = .043, η 2 = .08, such that children from single-mother families received higher scores ( n = 29, M = 7.10, SD = 5.18) than children from two-parent families ( n = 28, M = 5.29, SD = 4.57).

There were no group differences in the number of children scoring above the cut-off on the SDQ for either mothers’ ratings ( n = 6 and n = 6), χ 2 (1) = .08, p = .777, or for teachers’ ratings, ( n = 7 and n = 4), χ 2 (1) = .77, p = .380, demonstrating no differences in the number of children with scores indicative of psychiatric disorder between the single mother and two-parent families.

According to the independent psychiatric ratings, the majority of the sample (89%) had no problems. There was no difference between family types in the proportion of children who displayed a psychiatric disorder; s light n = 2 and marked n = 1 in the single mother families, and slight n = 4 and marked n = 1 in the two-parent families, Fisher’s exact = .70, p = .554. Of these children, one showed emotional problems, one showed conduct problems, one had developmental problems and five exhibited multiple problems, such as a mixture of emotional and conduct problems, or a combination of developmental and conduct problems.