Maternal Irritability and Harsh Parenting

According to Belsky’s (1984) process model of parenting parent personality represents one of the most important factor influencing parenting behavior and child development. Among personality characteristics, irritability (i.e., the tendency to react impulsively and aggressively at the slightest provocation or disagreement; Caprara et al., 1985) consistently predicted aggressive behaviors across experimental and correlational studies (see e.g., Caprara, Gargaro et al., 1987). However, only a few studies (Greenwald et al., 1997; Shay & Knuston, 2008) have examined if parental irritability disrupts parental discipline and predicts the use of excessive punitive harsh parenting. The present study was aimed to fill this gap by examining the longitudinal associations between mother’s irritability and harsh parenting in 204 Italian families. Referencing latent state-trait theory (LST; Steyer, Ferring, & Schmitt, 1992; Geiser et al., 2014), first we decomposed the variance of irritability scale in trait and state component and, next, we assessed the unique role of irritability in predicting later harsh parenting above and beyond the effects of the fluctuating, state components. Participants were 204 mothers and their children drawn from Naples and Rome and assessed over a 4-year period. Mothers averaged 40.30 years (SD = 5.33) in wave 1 and 44.01 years (SD = 5.43) in wave 4. Their children (50% girls) were 9.45 years (SD = 0.74) at wave 1 and 13.18 years (SD = 0.66) at wave 4. Results of LST analysis confirmed that mother trait irritability component predicted later harsh parenting, above and beyond the effects of the occasion specific situational influences. These longitudinal findings corroborated the role of parental irritability trait in the escalation of coercive and punitive practice toward the child. We elaborated on the practical implications thereof.