Purpose: It has been assumed that parenting attitudes, home environment, and parental psychopathology are related to parents neglect and abuse of their children. Clarifying this is often complicated by the lack of adequate socio-demographically similar comparison groups. This study attempted to illuminate these relationships by evaluating family environments, parenting attitudes, and level of psychopathology in maltreating parents, foster parents, and comparison parents from the same urban neighborhoods.

Methods: This paper will report findings of a study of parenting attitudes, family environment, and level of psychopathology of caretakers participating in a longitudinal study of the effects of child abuse and neglect on young adolescent development. The racially diverse sample consisted of maltreated children and their caretakers (birth parents, foster parents, and kin caregivers) and comparison children and their caretakers recruited from the same neighborhoods as the maltreated children. As part of the study, the caretakers completed the Adult Adolescent Parenting Inventory (AAPI) (Bavolek & Keene,1999 ), the Family Environment Scale (FES) (Moos & Moos, 1981) and an adapted version of the Brief Symptom Inventory (Derogatis, 1983). The caretakers in the study were over 93% female and consist of 4 groups, biological mothers of maltreated children (N=136), biological mothers of comparison children (N=96), foster mothers of maltreated children (N=63), and female relatives caring for maltreated children (N=59). The racial ethnic breakdown was 36% African American, 10% white, 40% Latino, and 14% racially mixed. The internal consistencies of the measures in our sample for the AAPI constructs were: A=.69, B=.74, C=.81, D=.74, E=.34. Scale E (Oppressing Children's Power) was eliminated from analysis because of its poor reliability. FES internal consistencies were Conflict=.85, Achievement=.67, Organization/Control=.81, Cohesion/Expressiveness=.76, Moral/Religious=.85. The BSI alpha was .94. We compared these mothers on parenting attitudes (AAPI-II), family environment (FES), and the BSI with analysis of variance and post hoc group comparisons.

Results: We found significant differences between caretaker groups on dimensions of each measure with maltreating biological mothers showing some important differences from other caretakers. Among the differences, on the FES they were higher in Conflict/anger, lower on Cohesion/expressiveness, and lower on Organization/control than other caretakers. On The AAPI they showed a stronger belief in corporal punishment than foster mothers, had less empathy and more role reversal than comparison mothers. They had the highest levels of psychopathology of any group of caretakers.

Implications for Research and Practice: Theses results support the hypothesis that maltreating parents are different from demographically similar non maltreating parents and from the foster parents who assume responsibility for maltreated children. These differences are likely to relate to their neglect and abuse of their children and must be addressed in interventions. The levels of psychopathology, higher conflict/anger, and lower empathy seem to indicate that intervention may need to address more than parenting skills but look to underlying personal problems that may lead to the maltreating behavior.