Abstract
Children raised in single-mother families are at increased risk for psychopathology, but the mechanisms that help explain this relationship are understudied. In a community sample of diverse adolescents (N = 385, 52 % female, 48 % Caucasian) and their mothers, we hypothesized that single mothers would be more likely than cohabitating mothers to engage in negative parenting behaviors, which would predict adolescent psychopathology prospectively. Single mothers were more likely to engage in psychologically controlling behaviors, which predicted to their adolescent offspring experiencing higher rates of depressive symptoms and externalizing disorders. Girls were more susceptible to depressive symptoms via psychologically controlling parenting than boys in single-mother families. Further, single mothers were more likely to engage in rejecting parenting behaviors, which predicted to a higher prevalence of adolescent externalizing disorders. Surprisingly, rejection in single-mother families predicted to less severe anxiety symptoms in adolescents relative to two-parent families. It is likely that single mothers are not inherently inferior parents relative to cohabitating mothers; rather, their parenting practices are often compromised by a myriad of demands and stressors. Consistent with this postulate, low socioeconomic status was associated with single motherhood and negative parenting behaviors. Clinical implications and study limitations are discussed.
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Author Contributions
ID conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, and drafted the manuscript; JLH assisted in data analysis and drafting the manuscript revisions; LYA co-wrote the grants that enabled data collection for the study; LBA co-wrote the grants that enabled data collection for the study and participated in the design of the study, interpretation of the data, and helped to draft the manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.
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This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH79369 and MH101168 to Lauren B. Alloy.
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The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Daryanani, I., Hamilton, J.L., Abramson, L.Y. et al. Single Mother Parenting and Adolescent Psychopathology. J Abnorm Child Psychol 44, 1411–1423 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0128-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0128-x