Child physical abuse potential in intact families: The roles of marital satisfaction, parent-child interactions, and history of childhood physical abuse

This study attempted to identify problematic family interactions which may serve as early warning signs of increased child physical abuse potential in two-parent families. The primary purpose of the present study was to expand on the understanding of the relationship between two main variables identified based on the family systems theory and their contribution to the increased child physical abuse potential: intimate partner satisfaction and quality of parent-child relationship. Secondly, this study specifically focused on investigating families from the general population, thereby rendering the results more applicable to the development of effective primary and secondary prevention strategies. Another objective of this study was to examine the influence of the parental history of childhood physical abuse on child abuse potential in the general population.; Parents and their children between the ages of 3 and 6 (N = 49 families) participated in this study. Each parent was videotaped while playing with the child and filled out self-report measures of child physical abuse potential, marital satisfaction, and history of childhood physical abuse. The results indicated that marital satisfaction was a strong predictor of child physical abuse potential. History of child physical abuse predicted increased abuse potential for mothers only. No association between parent-child behaviors and child physical abuse potential was observed. However, significant associations were found between parental negative behaviors and history of childhood physical abuse for both mothers and fathers. The results also revealed a number of gender differences in parent-child interactions. The discussion of results includes study's limitations, strengths, implications for development of prevention/intervention strategies, and implications/suggestions for future research.