Parental agreement on child-rearing orientations: relations to parental, marital, family, and child characteristics.

Recent research on parental agreement on child-rearing values has found it to be positively related to effective parenting. The exact nature of the relation, however, is not clear. Are they different constructs, or is agreement simply one more variable that describes effective parenting? A sample of 136 families and their preschool children was studied by observation and an extensive self-report questionnaire package. Parental agreement was assessed using the Block Child-rearing Practices Report. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that the agreement score rarely added any information not already provided by the parental effectiveness scores. A Q-factor analysis revealed that the agreement score actually represented agreement to a standard of good parenting. The parents who were high agreers were good parents who agreed with other good parents, while the low agreers were ineffective parents who disagreed with other parents, good or bad. Implications of these results for future research on parental agreement are discussed.