ORIGINAL ARTICLE Coparenting Problems with Toddlers Predict Children’s Symptoms of Psychological Problems at Age 7 Tomo Umemura • Caroline Christopher • Tanya Mann • Deborah Jacobvitz • Nancy Hazen Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract This study examined whether coparenting during toddlerhood predicts children’s later symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, affective disorder, and somatic complaints. When children were 2 years old, 108 middle-class nonclinical families were observed in triadic interactions to assess two domains of dyadic coparenting (competitive and coop- erative), as well as each parent’s individual competitive behavior toward the spouse. Teachers and mothers reported children’s symptoms of psychological problems at age 7. Independent of cooperative coparenting and each parents’ individual harsh parenting, competitive coparenting pre- dicted children’s symptoms of ADHD and ODD. Interac- tions with child gender indicated that competitive coparenting predicted ADHD symptoms in boys (not in girls) and teacher-reported (not mother-reported) somatic complaints in girls (not in boys). ODD and ADHD symp- toms were also predicted by fathers’ (not mothers’) indi- vidual competitive behaviors. The children of parents who were both low in competitive behaviors had the lowest teacher-rated symptoms of affective disorder. Keywords Coparenting Á Developmental psychopathology Á Family systems Á Gender difference Introduction Previous studies have empirically demonstrated the role of coparenting problems in the development of children’s externalizing and internalizing behavior problems (see [1], for a meta-analysis). In particular, competitive patterns of coparenting, in which parents jockey for the child’s at- tention or give incompatible or antithetical directives to the child, may be particularly harmful to children’s later de- velopment. Such coparenting patterns can create internal conflict within a child, forcing the child to choose between his or her parents in deciding which one to affiliate with or obey, and thus may be particularly likely to predict later symptoms of psychological problems. However, previous studies have rarely addressed both positive and negative domains of coparenting simultaneously as predictors of children’s later behavior problem. In addition, only a lim- ited number of studies have reported relations between poor quality coparenting and more specific symptoms of externalizing and internalizing psychological problems, such as attention problems. Moreover, since previous co- parenting studies have focused on dyadic measures of co- parenting, the dynamics of mothers’ and fathers’ individual behaviors toward their partner during coparenting interac- tions are unclear. That is, studies have not well explored the extent to which mothers’ versus fathers’ competitive behavior toward the other parent plays a greater role in their children’s symptoms of psychological problems. T. Umemura (&) Institute for Research on Children Youth and Family, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Jos ˇtova 10, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic e-mail: tomoumemura@mail.muni.cz C. Christopher Prevention Research Center, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA T. Mann MGStrategy, Philadelphia, PA, USA D. Jacobvitz Á N. Hazen Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA 123 Child Psychiatry Hum Dev DOI 10.1007/s10578-015-0536-0