Trajectories of coparenting quality across ethnically diverse and interethnic parents

Abstract

The Interracial Couples’ Life Transitions (ICLT) model proposes that: i) interethnic parents experience more coparenting difficulties upon the birth of a child compared to same-ethnicity parents; and ii) there exists heterogeneity in interethnic parents’ coparenting quality, thus the coparenting experience cannot be generalized across all interethnic unions. In the present work, we examined these two propositions using a large-scale database of elevated risk, fragile families. In Study 1, we compared the longitudinal trajectories of coparenting in interethnic parents ( n = 574 mother-father unions) and their matched same-ethnicity counterparts ( n = 574 each mothers and fathers) and found that interethnic parents of Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White backgrounds consistently experienced lower and decreasing trajectories of coparenting compared to their counterparts across the first 9 years of a child’s life. In Study 2, we examined heterogeneity in coparenting trajectories for only interethnic mothers and fathers ( n = 1148) and found a three-trajectory profile in which the majority (75.5%) of parents fall into a contented (stable and high) coparenting profile. Our findings confirm and extend on the ICLT model, showing that most interethnic parents experience more coparenting difficulties across time compared to their counterparts, and although there is some heterogeneity in interethnic parents’ coparenting trajectories, most interethnic parents appear to experience stable and content coparenting across time.