Fathering in family context and child adjustment: a longitudinal analysis.

This study focuses on relations between fathers' behavior in family context and children's adjustment, including the roles of paternal depressive symptoms, paternal marital conflict behaviors, paternal parenting, and children's emotional security. Participants included 235 families with a six-year-old child, with families followed longitudinally each year for three years. In terms of fathers' adjustment, paternal problem drinking was related to paternal negative marital conflict behaviors and decreased positive parenting, which was associated with children's externalizing and internalizing problems. Fathers' depressive symptoms were directly related with children's internalizing problems. Children's emotional security was an intervening variable in relations between father's behavior in family context and children's development.