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Mother's and father's reports on their child's temperament: Does gender matter?

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Abstract

Temperament ratings were obtained from 56 pairs of parents throughout the child's first year to examine similarities and discrepancies in their report. Age, gender, stress, depression, and mother's temperament were considered as factors possibly contributing to differences in the parents’ ratings of their child's temperament.

Highlights

► There was general consensus between parents on child's temperament with exceptions. ► Parenting stress and maternal temperament variables resulted in discrepancies. ► The predictive contribution of paternal report was moderated by gender.

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    Furthermore, parents reported all measures, which may have caused response bias. For example, some of the parents' own characteristics affect their ratings on their child's temperament (Bayly & Gartstein, 2013; Rothbart et al., 2001), which we were unable to control for. We measured temperament with a very short form of the CBQ; consequently, we could examine only three broad dimensions.

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    Temperament was reported only by the mother and a laboratory-based assessment of the infant temperament could possibly reveal different aspects of the phenotype. The temperament reported by mother is also influenced by her temperament and other characteristics (Bayly and Gartstein, 2013), which might increase bias in the maternal reports. Additionally, parental reports might encase gender bias, however, the meta-analysis by Else-Quest et al. also includes many observational studies indicating that there are gender differences in temperament traits, as is also reported by single empirical studies (Gagne and Hill Goldsmith, 2011; Planalp et al., 2017; Willoughby et al., 2015), so we expect that sex differences in temperament are not completely due to a rater bias.

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    Regarding children's temperament, in previous studies, mothers' and fathers' reports have only moderately agreed (Clark et al., 2016; Rothbart et al., 2001), showing that, for example, mothers tend to rate children's effortful control and surgency higher than fathers (Clark et al., 2016). In addition, respondents' feelings of stress and their own temperament have shown to influence their reports on their children's temperament (Bayly & Gartstein, 2013). However, we were unable to account for these factors, as we had no information on who reported the children's temperament and we did not collect information on the parents' temperaments.

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