Beyond the Parent–Child Dyad: Coparenting, Parental Mental Health, and Child Development

Research on child development has traditionally centered on the parent-child dyad, examining how individual parenting behaviors and parent-child interactions shape children's emotional, social, and cognitive development. Children, however, develop within a coparenting relationship: the ongoing coordination, support, undermining, and negotiation between the two (or more) caregivers responsible for a child, independent of their gender, relationship status, or family structure. This coparenting relationship, rather than parenting or parent–child interaction quality alone, is increasingly recognized as a distinct family-level process linking caregivers' mental health, family functioning, and child developmental outcomes.Existing research has tended to examine either the parent–child dyad in isolation, or coparenting specifically through the lens of fathers' involvement, leaving the coparenting relationship itself, as a joint, bidirectional caregiver relationship shaped by both partners' mental health, comparatively underexamined, particularly across diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and family contexts.This Research Topic focuses on the coparenting relationship as the primary unit of analysis, rather than as a secondary variable within parent-child or single-caregiver research. We welcome studies examining how the mental health of both caregivers, jointly and individually, relates to coparenting quality, and how coparenting in turn shapes child development and family well-being. We are particularly interested in contributions that adopt relational, dyadic, triadic, or systemic designs, spanning the transition to parenthood and perinatal period through infancy and into early and middle childhood.This Research Topic welcomes contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Coparenting quality and its developmental correlates across infancy, early, and middle childhood• The bidirectional relationship between caregivers' mental health and coparenting dynamics• Observational and self-report approaches to assessing coparenting and inter-caregiver relationships• Mechanisms linking coparenting processes (rather than individual parenting) to child outcomes• Coparenting across diverse family configurations, including separated, reconstituted, and same-sex caregiving arrangements• Cultural and contextual variation in coparenting processes• Development, adaptation, and evaluation of interventions targeting the coparenting relationship specificallyWe particularly welcome longitudinal, observational, experimental, intervention, mixed-methods, and cross-cultural studies, as well as systematic and scoping reviews that advance conceptual and methodological understanding of coparenting as a family process distinct from parent-child interaction quality.By treating coparenting as its own unit of analysis, this Research Topic seeks to contribute to a relational and systemic developmental science, one that considers not only how individual caregivers influence children, but also how the relationship between caregivers shapes the family contexts in which children grow and develop.Submissions should examine how coparenting and caregiver mental health relate to children’s social-emotional development. Broader developmental or child mental-health outcomes are welcome when clearly linked to those social-emotional processes. Studies focused solely on adult caregivers’ mental health or coparenting quality, without a meaningful connection to children’s development, are outside the Topic’s scope. Topic editors: Francisca Sofía Pérez Cortés, Hervé Tissot, James P McHale, Selin Salman-Engin Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85746/beyond-the-parent-child-dyad-coparenting-parental-mental-health-and-child-development