Parenting alliance and its relations to components of psychophysical well-being of children

Abstract

In the research literature parenting alliance is a conceptual term that refers to the ways that parents relate to each other in the role of parent. Coparenting occurs when individuals have overlapping or shared responsability for rearing particular children, and consists of the support and coordination (or lack of it) that parental figures exhibit in childrearing.The coparenting relationship does not include the romantic, sexual, companionate, emotional, financial and legal aspects of the adults's relationship that do not relate to childrearing. Furthermore, the term coparenting does not imply that parenting roles are or should be equal in authority or responsibility. The research presented in this paper had the aim to examine relations between parenting alliance and the components of psychophysical well-being of preschool and school age children. The research was conducted on sample of 248 mothers from Novi Sad. Instruments with which we collected data were as follows: Parenting Alliance Measure Scale (Abidin, Konold, 1999) and Child Health Questionnaire - for the purposes of research composed of 40 items from the original CHQ / Child Health Questionnaire (Landgraf, Ware Jr., 1996). By analyzing the latent structure of this reserach, we aquired data, which showed us, that parenting alliance is correlated with five dimensions of psychosocial and with one dimension of physical well-being of a child. These data suggest a significance of parental cooperation and generally the significance of family relations in the impact of emotional, social and physical functioning of the child. However, the causes of negative psychophysical functioning is very hard to discover. Therefore, more precise informations would be obtaind by rersearching some personal characteristics of parents and children, as well as researching the context of parenting.