Comparatively little research has examined the possible moderating effect of mothering on the associations between fathering behaviors and child outcomes. Family systems approaches to parenting have found evidence that the association between one parent-adolescent relationship and adolescent outcomes may depend on the other parent-adolescent relationship (Sim, 2003). The parenting behavior of the mother could moderate the association between fathering and child adjustment for several reasons. First, parents who co-parent successfully may reinforce each other by parenting similarly, in effect, drawing upon similar parenting scripts. This may help create an especially orderly environment for the child, and may uniquely contribute to child functioning. Alternatively, parents may intentionally divide up or split parenting tasks so that a dimension like monitoring cannot be accurately represented without consideration of the spouse’s monitoring of the adolescent. Therefore, we test whether mothering moderates the association between fathering and child adjustment and hypothesized that adolescents will have better adjustment when both parents are consistent in discipline, acceptance, monitoring, and interaction and expect poorer adolescent adjustment when both parents show rejection.
