Supportive co-parenting may reduce some child behavio...(can help manage the problem. The st...),Health

The study appears online in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and will be published in a future print edition.

The research involved 92 families with a 4-year-old child. The parents and children visited a lab for about 1.5 hours. Parents completed a questionnaire about their child's temperament, and mothers reported about their child's behavior.

The researchers also asked a preschool teacher or day care provider of each child to give their independent assessment of the child's behavior.

Each mother, father, and child was then videotaped while completing two 10-minute tasks together. The tasks, which included building a house out of a toy-building set, were designed to see how mothers and fathers worked with each other and their child to complete the task.

After watching the videotape, researchers rated the quality of the co-parenting relationship. They looked for signs of supportive co-parenting, such as couples encouraging and cooperating with each other as they helped their child. Researchers also looked for evidence of couples criticizing each other's parenting or trying to "outdo" each other in their efforts to work with the child.

One year later, mothers again reported on children's behavior, as did the children's preschool or kindergarten teachers.

While levels of aggressive behaviors increased during that year in many children with low effortful control, the notable exception was children whose parents showed supportive co-parenting.

"Supportive co-parenting may have prevented growth in these negative behaviors over one year's time," Schoppe-Sullivan said.

The study doesn't show exactly what it is about supportive co-parenting that helps children with behavior problems. But it may be that good co-parenting promotes a sense of family security in children that makes it easier for them to focus on controlling their own behaviors an
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