When People Parent Together: Let’s Talk About Coparenting

Abstract

FCS2277, a 7-page fact sheet by James McHale, Jason Baker, and Heidi Liss Radunovich, will help anyone who is "coparenting" children--raising children with the help of another adult. It explains why cooperative and respectful coparenting is key to the healthy development of children and will help coparents understand whether their coparenting relationship is in good health or in need of a tune-up. Published by the UF Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, October 2007.

The Prospective Co-Parenting Relationship Scale (PCRS) for Sexual Minority and Heterosexual People: Preliminary Validation

“…Coparenting concerns the act of both members of the couple sharing family management, division of domestic labor, agreement on child education, and mutual support on parenting [1][2][3][4]. However, coparenting may also refer to divorced parents, persons who have children together but never were a couple, or two or more people who share the task of raising a child [5,6].…”

“…Furthermore, supportive coparenting seems to enhance the couples' relationship quality across the transition to parenthood [9]; it also represents an important mechanism to buffer some challenges in specific situations such as foster parenthood [10]. Disturbances in the coparenting relationship have been associated with development and psychopathology problems on children [5,11].…”

“…The coparenting relationship does not simply begin with the birth of children given that a process of planning and negotiation usually takes place before [5,6]. In fact, the way parents think about their future coparenting relationship seems to be a good predictor of their success in developing a strong coparenting alliance [5,6]. However, few studies have focused on the coparenting relationship across the transition to parenthood or in a prospective way [9,11].…”

“…The parenting experience, including the prospective one, which comprises the planning and negotiation about parenting and the way future parents think about their future coparenting relationship [5,6], also differs according to the social and cultural context [22,[24][25][26]. Therefore, instruments assessing coparenting should encompass cultural variability [16,27].…”

Shared child rearing in nuclear, fragile, and kinship family systems: Evolution, dilemmas, and promise of a coparenting framework.

“…This circumstance exists in part because coparenting adaptation has historically been conceptualized subsidiary to marital process and in part because the coparenting field is newer. While most coparenting curricula and interventions are new and have not yet been validated empirically, there are now many materials attending at least in part to internal coparenting dynamics in fami-lies, including the following: When People Parent Together: Let's Talk About Coparenting (McHale, Baker, & Radunovich, 2007); Working Together for Our Baby: A Guide to Coparenting (McHale & Baker, 2008)) and Coparenting Our Preschool Child (McHale, Baker, & Radunovich, 2009), both from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg's Family Study Center; Michigan State's Caring for My Family curriculum (Shirer, Harden, Contreras, Spicer, & Hanson, 2002), developed specifically for low-income, at-risk families; Family Foundations (Feinberg, 2005), a program developed by researchers at Penn State University; and materials developed for a Louisiana Healthy Marriage initiative (Raising Your Child Together: A Guide for Unmarried Parents with companion video; Ooms, 2003). These and newer curricula being developed and piloted provide a beginning basis for interventions with expectant and new parents integrating empirically based knowledge about coparenting challenges and the impact of coparenting on children's socioemotional development.…”