Fully sharing childcare responsibilities may cause parents to be more critical of one another than when the father has a more play-oriented role, finds a new study from the University of Ohio.
Researchers worked with 112 two-parent families, each with a four-year-old child. The parents were given a survey to complete, asking how much time they each spent on caregiving activities, such as feeding and bathing the child, versus play activities.
The family was then observed while the child tried to complete some age-appropriate but difficult tasks that required guidance from the parents.
In those families where the father had indicated a more play-oriented parenting style, the couples tended to support each other as they cooperated to help their children complete the task. However, researchers noted that the parents who shared the caregiving role more equally tended to undermine and criticize one another
"If the mother is solely responsible for child care, she gets to determine how it is done. But if she is sharing those duties with the father, there is more opportunity for conflict about how tasks should be done," explained Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-author of the study, which was published in the journal Developmental Psychology.
"There is more than one path to an effective co-parenting relationship," she concluded, ““Effective co-parenting is not necessarily synonymous with equally sharing caregiving duties."