Mothers' and Fathers' Personality, Infants' Anger Proneness, and Responsive Parenting

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.