THE RELATION OF CHILDHOOD ABUSE AND EARLY PARENTING EXPERIENCES TO CURRENT MARITAL QUALITY IN A NONCLINICAL SAMPLE

This study examines the relation between adults' reports of the nature of the early parenting they received, including abuse, and the qualit y of their marital relationship. This community sample of 159 married women and men experienced relatively low levels of abuse. The regressi on analyses indicated that for women verbal abuse in childhood was pre dictive of marital conflict, and the caring parenting they experienced predicted the depth of their marital relationship. For men, the abuse variables did not predict any dimension of their current marital rela tionship. Of the parenting variables, overprotection was significantly predictive of conflict in their marriage. No demographic variable-inc ome, education, and number of siblings-predicted any dimension of mari tal quality for either men or women. Given the skew of the abuse data for this nonclinical sample, log transformations were performed on the data and the regression analyses were reported. One change was noted: that for men, physical abuse and overprotection were equally predicti ve of marital conflict. The results suggest that abuse and early paren t experiences are predictive of marital functioning in a nonclinical s ample, but that differences exist in the pattern for men and women.