Parenting Self-Efficacy Among Veteran Fathers: An Exploratory Study

Background and Purpose: Although half of male veterans are fathers, little research on fathering specifically includes veterans.  The majority of existing research on veteran fathers focuses on veterans from the Vietnam era who have PTSD and how this might negatively affect parental functioning.  Veteran fathers are a distinct group of fathers given the unique context of military life and experiences, including disruptions in the typical fathering role (e.g. deployment) or heightened risk (e.g. depression and anxiety); but can also foster strengths including the support and encouragement of family formation and a sense of self-efficacy.  Within the limited literature on veteran fathers, a sense of commitment and control over life situations has been indicated as being a potential buffer to parenting stress, which is related to a host of parenting and child well-being outcomes.  A sense of control or self-efficacy may be a positive indicator of general veteran well-being. However, parenting self-efficacy is not well-understood as a construct in the general fathering literature, let alone among veteran fathers more specifically; and parenting self-efficacy may be uniquely distinct from a general sense of control.  This paper is designed to explore the effect of veteran status on parenting self-efficacy.

Methods: This study is a secondary data analysis of the Survey of Contemporary Fatherhood, and national study of fathers (Shafer, Holmes, Bellamy, Petts, & Easton, 2015). Data was collected through an online survey using Qualtrics. A total of 2296 fathers and father figures with children between the ages of two and 18 participated in the survey. These data were analyzed using descriptive statistics to explore the relationship between mental health stressors commonly experienced by veteran fathers (e.g. depression, anxiety, PTSD) and parenting self-efficacy. Then, using a propensity score matching technique treating veteran status as the “intervention”, veteran fathers were matched to non-veteran fathers controlling for these common stressors and other determinants of fathering (e.g. mother-father relationship and child and family demographics).

Results: A total of 432 (18.8%) of fathers participating in the survey had served in the military. Of these, about half (52.8%) reported serving in a combat zone. Veteran fathers had a slightly higher average depression and anxiety scores as compared to non-veteran fathers, though neither of these differences were statistically significant. The estimated effect of veteran status on parenting self-efficacy in the propensity score matching model suggests that veteran fathers are over twice as likely to feel that they cannot handle things well as a parent (OR = 2.22, SE= .77). However, there is no estimated effect of veteran status on more general measures of self-efficacy.

Conclusions: Veteran status may confer a unique risk toward parenting self-efficacy that does not generalize to a more global sense of control and efficacy. Findings from this study suggest that veteran fathers may need supports or interventions to specifically target their sense of confidence and skill at performing their role as parent. This study is exploratory in nature, however, and as such results should be interpreted with caution.