Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Purpose: As the present empirical base rather indirectly illuminates the role that fathers play in mothers' risk for physical child abuse and neglect, this paper broadly examines father-related factors in the etiology of maternal physical child abuse and neglect. We examine data drawing from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study, a national population-based study.

Methods: In-home and phone interviews were conducted when index children were 3 years old on a national birth cohort of 3,356 families across 20 U. S. cities. Predictor variables included the mother-father relationship status and quality, fathers' educational, employment and economic contributions, fathers involvement with their children, and key family and maternal background factors. Physical child abuse and neglect proxies included observed mother-child relationship quality (emotional responsivity and non-punitive behavior) drawing from the Home Observation of the Environment (HOME) scale, self-reported maternal physical and psychological aggression, and neglectful behaviors drawing from the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), self-reported maternal spanking, and food insecurity. Cross-sectional bivariate and negative binomial regressions including key background factors were conducted to discern unique father-related predictors of maternal physical child abuse and neglect proxies.

Results: At the bivariate level, mothers married to fathers are at lower risk for most proxies of both physical abuse and neglect. After accounting for background factors, negative binomial regression analyses indicate that fathers' educational attainment and positive involvement with their children most noticeably account for a protective paternal role in maternal physical child maltreatment risk. Fathers' coercion toward the mother selectively predicts greater maternal self-reported child neglect, and maternal spanking. After accounting for fathers' psychosocial factors associated with social and human capital (fathers' involvement with the child, their support of and coercion toward the mother, and their education), fathers earnings and work status do not predict maltreatment risk, and marriage is associated both with higher risk on maternal physical abuse proxies, as well as with greater maternal emotional responsivity.

Implications: Fathers' psychosocial factors associated with social and human capital factors play the most discernable protective role in risk for maternal physical child abuse and neglect, and appear to explain the protective role of marriage observed in prior studies of physical abuse. Such findings point out the importance of accounting for these paternal psychosocial factors when developing risk screening instruments and specific preventive strategies targeting fathers in maternal physical child maltreatment.