The Impact Of Marital Quality On Father Involvement

Father involvement is a both old and young topic.It was once the focus of researchers in ancient times,and then abandoned by researchers in the 1950 s.It was not until the 1980 s that it returned to the public with the article "fathers: forgotten contributors to child development",and once again became the focus of research.At present,a large number of studies have confirmed that the father involvement will play an important and unique role in the development of children's individuation and socialization.Therefore,in order to realize the overall development of children,it is necessary for us to study the factors which affect fathers' involvement,so as to improve the frequency and quality of fathers' involvement.Studies have shown that spouse relationships,parent-child relationships and characteristics of parents and children are all important factors that affecting fathers' participation in parenting.However,in the past,researchers mainly focused on the parallel effect of one or more factors in the family,and paid little attention to the effects of complex interactions within the family that may affect father involvement.According to the family system theory,the subsystems in the family system will interact with each other continuously and influence each other.Therefore,father-child attachment and child temperament are adopted as mediators and moderators in this study to explore the impact of marital quality on father involvement.The conclusions of this study will refine the model of influencing factors of fathers' involvement and provide new perspectives and methods for promoting fathers' involvement.To this end,the study selected a total of 552 children's fathers from two public kindergartens in Jinan city and Weifang City as subjects,using “The Inventory of Father Involvement” which revised by Xu Yan,“ENRICH” that written by Olson et al,“Parent-Child Attachment Questionnaire” that written by Hong PeiPei and the “Parent Temperament Questionnaire” that written by the team of NYLS as assessment tools to test all subjects.The conclusions are as follows:(1)The overall level of father involvement is above the middle level.There are significant differences between the five ways in father involvement.Among the five dimensions,emotional expression and indirect support are the most frequent activities father get involve in,follow by academic encouragement,interaction and monitoring,regulation.(2)Father involvement does not show significant differences in the age and sex of their child,the father involvement shows significantly different in father's own education level and occupation,the higher the father's education level and professional level,the higher the degree of father's participation in the upbringing.(3)Marital quality can directly affect father involvement,also can indirectly affect father involvement through father-child attachment.Father-child attachment plays an intermediary role between marital quality and father involvement.(4)The mediating effect of father-child attachment between marital quality and father involvement is moderated by rhythmicity,adaptability and intensity of reaction in children's temperament.For those family which have a child whose temperament show poorer rhythmicity,adaptability and intensity of reaction,the effect of marital quality is more obvious.