ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with within-family coparenting, the communication, support, and solidarity between any two or more adults responsible for the care and upbringing of children for whom they share responsibility. Coparenting is a child-centered construct best understood through the eyes and experiences of children themselves. The authors (a) offer a brief history of formative ideas and theoretical perspectives influencing studies of coparenting; (b) review influential research on mother-father coparenting, beginning with early studies of mother-father coparenting in co-residential, largely White families; (c) bridge to emerging scholarship on mother-father coparenting in Black families and the fresh insights such work provides; and (d) close by briefly discussing coparenting beyond mother-father-child triangles – that is, in family systems where individuals besides just the child’s mother and father play a formative role in the child’s socialization and acculturation. Such families represent a major, rising groundswell of all families worldwide, and conceptualizations of family communication around child-rearing must begin taking such family structures and their interior dynamics into fuller account.
