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Cross-Informant Discrepancies and their Association with Maternal Depression, Maternal Parenting Stress, and Mother-Child Relationship

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Abstract

Objectives

Children and adolescents, and their parents, often provide divergent assessments with regard to children’s and adolescents’ mental health. This paper addresses influential factors regarding discrepancies between mothers’ and children’s/adolescents’ reports on externalizing and internalizing problem behavior. The focus is on maternal characteristics (maternal depression, maternal parenting stress, and maternal perception of the relationship to their child) that may contribute to the emergence of discrepancies.

Methods

An empirical study with 1601 children and adolescents between the ages of 10 to 16 years, and 1119 mothers, was conducted addressing temporal relationships between maternal characteristics and informant discrepancies, with repeated assessments after 6 months.

Results

Based on polynomial regression, maternal parenting stress and negatively evaluated mother–child relationships proved to be the most important influential variables on the emergence of informant discrepancies. In addition, the results provided evidence for bidirectional influences between informant discrepancies and maternal characteristics (especially maternal depression and negative evaluations of the mother–child relationship). All significant relationships to maternal characteristics were restricted to externalizing behavior.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that specific maternal characteristics, which might influence maternal interpretations, explain the occurrence of informant discrepancies regarding externalizing problems. Conversely, informant discrepancies regarding externalizing problems predicted maternal characteristics. Accordingly, a reciprocal relationship between informant discrepancies and maternal characteristics seems likely and should be the subject to future research.

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Funding

This study was funded by a grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG) to A.L. and M.V. (Award Numbers: Lo 337/28-1 and VI 651/2-1). The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest related to this study.

Author Contributions

A.L. and M.V. were principle investigators of this study, which means that they designed and executed the study. A.L. wrote most parts of the paper, while M.V. cared about most parts of the statistical analyses. J.-E.R. organized and supervised the data-collections and supported the data-analysis.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jana-Elisa Rueth, Marc Vierhaus

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, P.O. Box 10 01 31, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Arnold Lohaus, Jana-Elisa Rueth & Marc Vierhaus

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  1. Arnold Lohaus
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  2. Jana-Elisa Rueth
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Correspondence to Arnold Lohaus.

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Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Moreover, the study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the German Psychological Society (DGPs).

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in this study.

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Lohaus, A., Rueth, JE. & Vierhaus, M. Cross-Informant Discrepancies and their Association with Maternal Depression, Maternal Parenting Stress, and Mother-Child Relationship. J Child Fam Stud 29, 867–879 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01625-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01625-z

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