Journal article
Mothers’ and Fathers’ Personality, Infants’ Anger Proneness, and Responsive Parenting
Journal of child and family studies, Vol.34(12), pp.3302-3314
12/2025
DOI: 10.1007/s10826-025-03195-9
PMCID: PMC12695959
PMID: 41394404
Appears in UI Libraries Support Open Access
Abstract
Parenting in infancy is immensely important for children’s development and therefore, contributors to varying quality of early parenting have been extensively studied. Among those, parents’ personality and its links with parenting have attracted intense interest, but factors that may affect those associations, including characteristics of the child, particularly in father-infant relationships, remain poorly understood (Taraban & Shaw, 2018). We present a study of 200 families, including infants, mothers, and fathers (Children and Parents Study). Parents reported their Big Five traits and distress/psychopathology. We observed their parenting (a composite of responsiveness, positive affect, and reversed negative affect, defined as positive responsiveness) toward the infant in home interactions. The infants’ anger proneness, most often considered a characteristic that poses parenting challenges, was observed in standard temperament episodes, and modeled as a moderator of personality — parenting relations. Mothers showed more responsiveness, more positive affect, and less negative affect than fathers. Fathers’ higher Agreeableness, Openness, and Extraversion were associated with more responsiveness. The effect of Agreeableness was further qualified by its interaction with child anger proneness: More agreeable fathers were more responsive toward infants high or average in anger proneness, and highly disagreeable fathers were less responsive toward those infants. Mothers’ personality traits, alone or in interaction with infants’ anger proneness, were unrelated to their parenting; however, mothers who were higher in distress/psychopathology were less responsive toward their infants, especially when the infants were high or average in anger proneness.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Mothers’ and Fathers’ Personality, Infants’ Anger Proneness, and Responsive Parenting
- Creators
- Grazyna Kochanska - Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United StatesLilly C. Bendel-Stenzel - University of IowaDanming An - Lehigh University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of child and family studies, Vol.34(12), pp.3302-3314
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10826-025-03195-9
- PMID
- 41394404
- PMCID
- PMC12695959
- NLM abbreviation
- J Child Fam Stud
- ISSN
- 1062-1024
- eISSN
- 1573-2843
- Publisher
- Springer Nature
- Grant note
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development: R01 HD091047
This work was funded by the grants from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD091047 and R01 HD110427) to Grazyna Kochanska. We thank staff and students in Child Lab for many contributions over the years and all the participating families for their commitment to our research.
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 10/31/2025
- Date published
- 12/2025
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9985024250802771
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