Perceptions of Parenting Among Women Who Have Experienced Intimate Partner Violence

Background and Purpose: Intimate partner violence (IPV) has been associated with mothers having less time and emotional energy to devote to children, using harsh discipline, and reporting increased parenting stress and decreased parenting satisfaction.  Women are socially viewed as primarily responsible for meeting all of their children’s needs; yet, little is known about the challenges faced by women who experience IPV as they work to simultaneously fulfill their role as mothers and navigate an abusive relationship.  The purpose of this study was to obtain women’s perceptions on their role as mothers and how IPV has influenced this role. 

Method: Data were taken from three waves of interviews with women who had experienced recent IPV and were seeking civil legal services from Legal Aid.  Women provided responses to two open-ended questions about their role as a mother and how IPV affected this role.  Women also responded to survey questions on their parenting discipline and nurturance (two subscales of the Self-Efficacy for Parenting Tasks Index; SEPTI) and their satisfaction with the parenting role and parent-child relationship (Kansas Parental Satisfaction Scale; KPSS).  Responses to open-ended questions were gathered at Wave 1 (N = 150; women’s mean age = 32.07).  Measures from the SEPTI and KPSS were gathered at Wave 1 and then again at Waves 2 (n = 112) and 3 (n= 85), which respectively occurred 6 and 12 months later.   

Results: Women’s responses to the question about their role as mothers centered on four themes: 1) explanation of duties (e.g., to keep children safe and healthy; teach children good values; provide discipline; to be strong), 2) value of the role (e.g., best role you could have), 3) description of role (e.g., challenging; difficult; important; fulfilling), and 4) evaluation of self as a mother (e.g., bad; pretty good mom; very broken).  Themes that emerged from women’s responses on how IPV affected their role as a mother focused on: 1) leniency and hesitation to discipline or over-disciplining, 2) emotional unavailability and being detached, 3) overcompensating and overprotecting, 4) no effect on mothering, and 5) gaining strength.  A repeated measures ANOVA showed a significant increase in discipline scores from Wave 1 to Wave 3, F(2, 168) = 3.78, p = .025, which indicated positive growth.  Post-hoc paired-samples t tests showed that Wave 1 scores were significantly lower than Wave 3 scores: t(84) = -2.45, p= .016.  There was no statistically significant change from Wave 1 to Wave 3 with respect to either women’s reports of nurturing or parenting satisfaction.

Conclusion and Implications: The study findings revealed women’s parenting was influenced by IPV in both negative and positive ways.  Many women reported that IPV impacted their ability to discipline their children and their scores related to discipline increased over the course of one year, showing positive change.  Interventions and services available to women who experience IPV should incorporate strategies for assessing and identifying women’s perceptions of mothering/parenting as influenced by IPV, while simultaneously highlighting and building upon women’s coping abilities and strengths as mothers.