Fifty-two married partners played with their 30-month-olds in both dyadic (parent-child) and whole family contexts and reported on their own coparenting activities (family integrity-promoting behavior, conflict, disparagement, and reprimand). Coparenting behavior observed in the whole family context was evaluated for antagonism, warmth and cooperation, child-adult centeredness, balance of positive involvement, and management of toddler behavior. Parallel balance and management scores were also formed using dyadic session data. Men's reported family integrity-promoting activities and women's reported conflict and reprimand activities were reliable correlates of family group process in both bivariate and discriminant analyses, with links enduring even after controlling for marital quality. Whole family- and dyad-based estimates of coparenting were altogether unrelated, and reported coparenting was tied only to behavior in family context, not to family measures created from dyad-based data.

Though the study of coparenting is still in its infancy, an explosion of coparenting research is in the wings. This paper identifies several emerging issues in coparenting theory and research to guide work in the years ahead, including issues in definition, conceptualization, and measurement; the interface between coparenting and adult development; and conceptual benefits that will accrue from studies of interadult coordination across diverse cultures and family systems. We emphasize that theory must lead empirical efforts, that across family systems the strongest coparental alliances are likely to be those in which the coparents both experience and provide support and solidarity for one another's parenting efforts with the children, and that measurement approaches need to be expanded so as to capture more comprehensively each family's organizational cooparenting structures and themes.

The parental fitness of psychiatrically diagnosed individuals is often questioned in termination of parental rights cases. The goal of this article is to shift the focus from a predisposing bias of unfitness to a functional-contextual analysis of parenting behavior and competency. Three underlying biased assumptions are relevant for the courts' decision making: (a) that a diagnosis (past or present) predicts inadequate parenting and child risk, (b) that a diagnosis predicts unamenability to parenting interventions, and (c) that a diagnosis means the parent is forever unfit. Each assumption will be considered in light of empirical evidence, with major depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and mental retardation provided as examples of diagnostic labels often assumed to render a parent unfit. A research agenda to improve clinicians' ability to assess parental fitness and understanding of how parental mental illness, mental retardation, or substance abuse might compromise parenting capacities is discussed for forensic purposes.

This study examines early withdrawal in the coparenting system, and the utility of a brief problemsolving discussion about coparenting responsibilities as a means for evaluating such withdrawal. One hundred and fifteen couples were evaluated both prenatally and at 3 months postpartum. During prenatal assessments, parents rated their personalities and completed marital assessments. After the baby arrived, they completed a negotiation task in which they discussed disputes about parenting roles and responsibilities, and interacted together with the baby in a triadic play assessment. Fathers' but not mothers' withdrawal during coparenting negotiations was associated with greater disengagement and less warmth during triadic play and with fathers' feelings that mothers did not respect their parenting. Fathers' but not mothers' withdrawal during coparenting negotiations was also forecast by low ego resilience and by an increase in depressive symptomatology during the postpartum. As the negotiation task appeared to be an effective provocateur of withdrawal when confronting coparenting disagreement, it may prove useful for eliciting this aspect of coparental process in work with couples. KeywordsCoparenting; Withdrawal; Infancy; Disengagement; Ego Resilience; Transition to Parenthood While virtually all mental health contacts with families of infants and toddlers engage mothers and occasionally consult fathers or other family caregivers, most routinely fail to assess the emerging coparenting alliance developing between the two parents (Feinberg, 2002; FivazDepeursinge & Corboz-Warnery, 1999;McHale & & Cowan, 1996;McHale, Kuersten-Hogan & Rao, 2004;McHale, Khazan et al., 2002). While much of this neglect is attributable to the dyadic model saturating infant mental health practice (McHale, 2007a), it is also the case that coparenting assessments are hindered by a general lack of agreed-upon strategies for evaluating coparental functioning during early infancy. Self-report indicators of coparenting developed in research settings (Abidin & Brunner, 1995;McHale, 1997) do not offer useful norms or categorical thresholds denoting clinical distress levels, while creative observational assessments such as the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) (Fivaz-Depeursinge & CorbozWarnery, 1999) are not yet in widespread use. © FPI, Inc.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to James McHale, Department of Psychology, Family Study Center, USFSt. Petersburg, 140 7th Ave. S., Bldg. One, Suite 100, St. Petersburg, FL 33701. E-mail: jmchale@stpt.usf.edu. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptThe absence of coparenting conceptualizations in infant mental health practice cannot be overstated, exemplified by the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities of Infancy and Early Childhood, Revised Edition's exclusively dyadic relationship focus. Indeed, even when coparenting issues have been targeted by infant-family scholars, withdrawal and dis...