| Previous studies have looked at the protective effects of parental knowledge of children's daily activities on children's psychological outcomes (Crouter and Head, 2002; Dishion and McMahon, 1998). A number of these studies found that parental warmth and acceptance is a mediating factor in both knowledge and better psychological outcomes. Other researchers have found that children's and adolescents' stressful life events are predictive of poorer psychological outcomes (Dohrenwend, 2006; Grant, Compas, Thurm, McMahon, & Gipson, 2004). The current study brought together these two areas of research to investigate the association between parental knowledge of children's stressful life events and parental warmth and acceptance. It was hypothesized that parents who knew more about their children's severely stressful life events were those that were more warm and accepting. Variables of age of child, gender of parent and child, family composition, as well as some interaction of variables were also analyzed in relation to parental knowledge.; 203 nine- to fifteen-year-old children from single-parent and dual-parent families that were recruited for a larger longitudinal study of child stressful life events, coping, and competence were included in this study. Approximately 50% of the children were girls and there were 191 mothers and 45 fathers included in the study. Thirty three of the families included both parents' data while the rest of the children only had data from either a mother or father. The data was culled from the Contextual Assessment of Stressful Events in Childhood (Howe, Weihs, Andersen, Matty, Litvinov, and Shellmer, 2004) interviews which were conducted with families where one family member had recently become unemployed. This study used agreement between parents and children on specific severe stressful life events as the measure of parental knowledge. Parent-child relationship quality, i.e. warmth and acceptance, was measured using two questionnaires, the Child Report of Parenting Behaviors Inventory and the Parent report of Parenting Behaviors Inventory (Shaefer, 1965). Hypotheses were tested using logistic regression.; Overall agreement, i.e. parental knowledge, was relatively low for both mothers and fathers (less than 45% agreement for each). Nevertheless, the interaction of parental knowledge and parent gender was found to be significantly associated with parental warmth and acceptance such that fathers who were more warm and accepting of their children were those who also knew more about their children's stressful life events while there was no association for mothers. Implications for these findings will be discussed. |
