The Influence of Marital Satisfaction on Father Involvement and Child Development

during infancy is crucial. Moreover, the more involved fathers are in the beginning, the more they are involved with child care tasks in the future (Pleck, 2004). Father involvement can be defined by a wide range of activities. These include cognitive stimulation activities such as reading and playing games with the child; physical care, including changing diapers and preparing meals; paternal warmth, which can be tickling or holding the child; nurturing activities such as comforting the child who wakes at night or taking the child to the doctor; and care giving, which involves things like bathing and dressing the child (Tinkew, 2007). Researchers have also studied belief systems that affect men’s perceptions of father involvement and care giving. The father social role theory postulates there are shared norms and expectations about how fathers internalize their concept of involvement which are influenced by cultural norms and expectations. “Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the way in which fathers define their roles influences the quality and quantity of their behavior with their children” (McBride, Brown, Bost, Shin, Vaughn, & Korth, 2005, p. 360). However, these norms are changing, in part because women are now moving into the work force and are being viewed as equal in their careers to their male counterparts (Bonney, 1999). Because cultural norms are changing to emphasize the more nontraditional division of labor, father involvement with parenting tasks has increased substantially. However, women still perform the majority of the child care labor. In traditional families where the man is the primary financial provider and the woman works inside the home, men perform 22 percent of the child care tasks, whereas in nontraditional families (both spouses work full time), Much research has been devoted to discovering the components of a satisfying marital relationship. Typically, researchers measure marital quality by asking spouses to rate their global marital satisfaction, which is defined as “an attitude of greater or lesser favorability toward one’s own marital relationship” (Roach, Frazier & Bowden, 1981, p. 537). Marital satisfaction is associated with many benefits for children’s development. Among these benefits are more father involvement and an increase in the secure attachment of infants to their parents (Bonney, 1999). In contrast, one of the consequences of an unsatisfying marital relationship is a lack of closeness and connectedness between infants and their parents, which can lead to disruptive behaviors in preschool children (DeVito, 2001). Marital dissatisfaction and permissive parenting practices also predict disorderly conduct among preschool children (Devito, 2001). Because of this, it is important to study the implications of marital dissatisfaction and how it directly affects parents’ relationships with their children.