Paternal Stress and Paternal Warmth: The Moderating Role of Fathers' Childrearing Attitudes

Background and Purpose: As fathers have become increasingly involved in the socialization of their children over the past few decades, research examining family impacts of fathering and father involvement has grown. The existing body of research provides strong evidence suggesting that fathers play a crucial role in positive child developmental outcomes, including cognitive skills and social competence. While parenting stress has been identified as a potential risk factor of parental warmth and parent-child interaction, parents’ positive attitudes about childrearing has received increasing attention as a protective factor that may moderate this risk-outcome relationship. Although previous studies have examined the relationship between parental stress and parental warmth, little is known about whether positive childrearing attitudes moderates the influence of parental stress on parental warmth among fathers with young children. Using Pleck’s (2010) conceptual framework of father involvement, this study hypothesized that: 1) parental stress is negatively associated with paternal warmth, and 2) fathers’ childrearing attitudes moderate the relationship between parental stress and paternal warmth.

Method: This study utilized cross-sectional national data collected from 1,192 fathers with children (2-8 years) who participated in the Survey of Contemporary Fatherhood. Parental stress was measured by using five items to assess fathers’ perceived stress of childrearing (1 = never to 5 = very often). Paternal warmth was measured with eight items that contained 5-Likert response options, based on questions that assessed fathers’ positive childrearing behaviors. Fathers’ childrearing attitudes were measured with eight items that assessed the father’s perceptions of childrearing and his responsibility (McGill, 2014). Covariates included child age, father age, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, relationship and residential status, and mental health problems (e.g., depression). Multiple regression models assessing paternal warmth were performed to examine the moderating role of fathering attitudes in the relationship between parental stress and paternal warmth.

Results: Regression models indicated significant relationships between parental stress and paternal warmth (B=-0.02, p <.05). Fathers’ childrearing attitudes were found to moderate the relationship between parental stress and paternal warmth (B=0.07, p<.05), illustrating the protective role of fathers’ childrearing attitudes in reducing negative impacts of parental stress on paternal warmth.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings provide evidence in line with prior studies that indicate parental stress is associated with less warmth among fathers. Findings from this study also extend the current literature by finding that childrearing attitudes moderated this relationship for fathers such that parental stress was statistically significantly related to paternal warmth among those fathers with more negative childrearing attitudes. These findings bring additional nuance to prior studies that link childrearing attitudes to parenting behaviors. These results suggest that future intervention programs for fathers could focus on childrearing attitudes to improve child involvement and may be best targeted to fathers with more negative attitudes and parenting stressors.