The proposed research is a prospective longitudinal study of how marriages evolve and deteriorate, how families form and change, and how relationships in families contribute to the social and behavioral development of young children. Funds are requested to continue an 8-wave multimethod study examining the development of 172 newlywed couples over their first 5 years of marriage. These couples are now in a period of high risk for marital distress and many of these couples are becoming parents. This data set therefore provides unique opportunities to study the developmental course of marital dysfunction and the interplay among marital, child, and parent-child functioning.
Three specific aims are proposed: First, marital satisfaction and dissolution over 10 years will be examined in relation to the enduring characteristics spouses bring to marriage, the stressful events they encounter, and the behaviors they display when discussing marital and individual difficulties. Second, data collected over the transition to parenthood will be combined with the extensive pre-pregnancy data already collected to predict which couples will experience difficulties in negotiating the transition to parenthood, to examine the marital functioning of couples who have children early versus late in the first ten years of marriage, and to compare the marital and family environments to which first and second children are exposed.
The third aim of the proposed research is to investigate the hypotheses that children's self-regulatory and social functioning derive from the emotional and interpersonal behaviors displayed in marital and parent-child interactions. Marital interaction, parent-child interaction, and child self-regulation data collected at age 5, and child-friend data collected at age 7, will be added to the pre-parenthood marital interaction data already collected to examine the familial roots of children's social competence. The original project is among the most intensive longitudinal studies of marriage conducted to date. The proposed research is intended to build upon this foundation by testing models of child and family development. The findings from this study are expected to have important implications for the timing, content, and targets of programs geared toward preventing adverse outcomes for couples, families, and children.
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