Pathways Among Negative Co-parenting, Parenting Stress, Authoritarian Parenting Style, and Child Adjustment: The Emotional Dysregulation Driven Model

Existing literature has outlined how parental emotional regulation could affect children’s adjustment and parenting behaviors. Family studies also showed how the negative mood created by negative co-parenting interactions might spill over into the parent-child relationship, resulting in high levels of parenting stress and coercive and authoritarian parenting behaviors, strictly associated with children’s psychological maladjustment. The present study explored families’ pathways by which high levels of parental emotional dysregulation could affect children’s psychological adjustment by considering the mediating role of co-parenting, parenting stress, and authoritarian style. Mediation analyses were performed using a sample of 143 Italian father-mother dyads. Results showed that parental emotional dysregulation was linked to a negative co-parenting relationship. Moreover, the data indicated that parental emotional dysregulation was linked to children’s adjustment through the serial mediation of negative co-parenting and parenting stress. The results are discussed in terms of clinical and research implications.