Linking Victimization of Psychological Intimate Partner Violence and Spanking Via Depression: A Dyadic Analysis

Background and Purpose: Violence, such as spanking and intimate partner violence (IPV), can have lasting adverse effects on young children’s development. A recent national survey of IPV reported that 49.4% of women and 45.1% of men experienced psychological aggression. Notably, psychological IPV tends to be more chronic and prevalent than physical and sexual IPV, which has been the primary focus of IPV research. Family systems theory posits that family members and subsystems are interdependent. Therefore, family relationships can be understood more fully by investigating mothers and fathers as part of a family system than as individual family members. We aim to address the relationship between psychological IPV and spanking by analyzing dyadic processes between fathers and mothers. We investigated how paternal and maternal IPV victimization is associated with spanking their toddlers and whether depression acted as a mediator between the link between IPV and spanking.

Methods: We used mothers' and fathers’ surveys from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study wave 3 dataset when children were three years of age. Because couple dynamics differ for resident and nonresident fathers, this study only included resident fathers. The total sample included 1,789 mother-father dyads. This study used the Actor-Partner-Interdependence Mediation Model to examine the effect of psychological IPV victimization on spanking frequency via depression, controlling for age, race/ethnicity, education attainment, marital status, income, and child sex. We performed structural equation modeling with bootstrapping (n=5000) using Mplus ver. 8.8.

Results: Controlling for the covariates, paternal and maternal victimization of psychological IPV was positively associated with their own spanking, but not their partner’s spanking. Paternal and maternal victimization was positively associated with their own depression and partner’s depression. Maternal depression was positively associated with her spanking. Maternal victimization had both direct and indirect effects on her spanking via her depression, while paternal victimization had only direct effects on his spanking. Additionally, the covariances in IPV victimization and the error terms of spanking and depression between mothers and fathers were all significant.

Conclusions and Implications: Victimization of psychological IPV, but not perpetration (i.e., partner’s report of victimization), was positively associated with spanking. This may imply that victimization by a partner increases a parent’s risk of being violent toward the child rather than one parent being the violent person in the family. Depression partially explained the effect of victimization on spanking, but only in mothers. There may be other mechanisms through which victimization impacts punitive parenting, and these mechanisms may differ between mothers and fathers. Aggression potentially transmits from one subsystem to another in a family system. Examining family violence from the family systems perspective can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the family dynamics, which can inform the design and implementation of more effective interventions. Social workers working with parents who use harsh parenting should consider screening for IPV experiences and provide additional support and resources as needed.