Parental Caregiving and Breadwinning Behaviors: Multiple Approaches for Understanding Predictors of Fathers' and Mothers' Involvement

135 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.Three major conceptual influences in Belsky's (1984) Process Model of Parenting (personality, marital relations, and social network) are utilized as predictors of the caregiving and breadwinning behaviors of fathers of preschool-aged children. Data on mothers is also analyzed to provide comparisons across gender. After testing the predictors in separate models, a hybrid model, constructed from the best predictors, is tested for each gender. Results indicate that all three of the individual influences are roughly equivalent in predicting parental behavior when analyzed individually, both for fathers and mothers. However, the hybrid models generally account for more variance than the individual models, suggesting the importance of simultaneously examining multiple conceptual influences on parental behavior in both genders. Further, for both fathers' and mothers' caregiving behaviors, the perceived caregiving behaviors of other same-sex parents emerged as a significant predictor, suggesting a potentially fruitful new avenue of research, and approach to intervention.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD