"Determinants of fathers’ and mothers’ involvement in a parenting intervention"

Professor Stephanie Reich (right) published an article in Psychology of Men & Masculinity assessing parental involvement in a child development intervention.

The title of the article is “Determinants of fathers’ and mothers’ involvement in a parenting intervention.”
 
Co-authors are Kelsey McKee (first author), Professor Natasha Cabrera (University of Maryland), Angelica Alonso, and Miguel Turcios.
 
Reich is a community psychologist studying contexts that support children’s development. Her research focuses on children’s direct and technologically mediated interactions with family, peers, and educational settings. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Society for Community Research and Action. Reich directs UCI's Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and serves as Associate Dean of UCI’s Graduate Program.

​Abstract
 
Parental involvement in interventions is key to their success. Drawing on data from an ongoing book-based parenting intervention aimed at increasing knowledge of child development among fathers and mothers of infants, we examined parents’ participation and quality of their engagement in the first 2 waves of the intervention, when children were 9 to 12 months old. We also examined the factors that predicted parents’ level of participation in the intervention. We report 2 sets of findings. First, parents participated an average of 2.6 times per week, and mothers participated more frequently than fathers. Almost all parents reported that they enjoyed reading the books regardless of their level of participation, though mothers reported slightly more enjoyment than fathers. Second, results of regression tree analyses showed that the most important predictor of mothers’ and fathers’ participation in the intervention was whether or not their partner was also participating. The other important set of predictors was the level of resources, hours worked, education, and household income for fathers and employment status and income for mothers. Our findings have important implications for improving fathers’ and mothers’ participation in interventions.