Coming Together or Falling Apart: Coparenting the First Child While Expecting the Second

The birth of an infant sibling is a normative life event for most young children and their parents. Prior research has indicated that coparenting the first child during the pregnancy with the second predicts the firstborn’s behavioral adjustment after the birth of their infant sibling. Using a latent dyad model (LDM), we tested the dyadic (variance shared across mothers and fathers) and individual (residual variance) contributions of mothers’ and fathers’ depression, parental efficacy, and parenting stress as predictors of undermining and cooperative coparenting with the first child during the last trimester of pregnancy with the second child. LDM revealed that it was the latent dyadic components of depression, efficacy, and parenting stress that couples shared that predicted coparenting relationship quality and not unique individual parent variability. Higher dyadic depression and lower dyadic parental efficacy predicted more undermining parenting, whereas higher dyadic efficacy predicted more cooperative coparenting of the first child before the birth of the second child. Further, children’s externalizing behaviors and marital conflict had effects on coparenting indirectly by decreasing parents’ sense of efficacy in managing difficult child behavior and increasing depressive symptoms.