Ricerc@Sapienza

According to Belsky’s process model of parenting, parents’ personality represents the most important factor influencing parenting and child development. While an extensive literature has empirically corroborated the role of irritability traits in predicting aggressive behaviors in laboratory-based studies, only a few studies have examined the role of irritability in predicting aggressive behaviors within family contexts. The present study addressed this gap by examining the longitudinal association between maternal irritability and harsh parenting.

The present study examines parents' self-efficacy about anger regulation and irritability as predictors of harsh parenting and adolescent children's irritability (i.e., mediators), which in turn were examined as predictors of adolescents' externalizing and internalizing problems. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents (N = 1,298 families) from 12 cultural groups in 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States) were interviewed when children were about 13 years old and again 1 and 2 years later.

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).