Shared parenting agreements after marital separation: the roles of empathy and narcissism

The identification of psychological and interpersonal factors that predict cooperation and agreement between ex-spouses is important to understanding, and eventually promoting, healthy postdivorce adjustment of parents and their children. By drawing on object relations theory, the authors identified differences between 16 ex-couples who were able to negotiate and maintain a cooperative parenting plan after separation ("agreed ex-couples") and 16 ex-couples who disagree about parenting arrangements ("disagreed ex-couples") but were similar in age, educational background, age of their children, and time since separation. As expected, disagreed ex-couples were more narcissistic, more interpersonally vulnerable, less able to take another's perspective, less concerned about the feelings and needs of others, more self-oriented, and less child-oriented and more self-important in their parenting attitudes than agreed ex-couples. Our findings also supported a process mediational model of "child-centeredness" that attempts to elucidate the pathways through which these variables are interrelated. This model suggests that ex-couples' empathy is associated directly with child-oriented but not self-important parenting attitudes, whereas self-orientation is associated directly with self-important but not child-oriented attitudes. A self-servicing orientation on the part of ex-couples does, however, relate to child-oriented parenting attitudes indirectly through self-important parenting attitudes.