ABSTRACT
The parenting relationship between mothers and fathers is so obviously a central feature of family life that its neglect by scholars and researchers, at least until the mid-1990s, calls for explanation. Indeed, until recently the construct of “co-parenting” was usually synonymous with postdivorce co-parenting and confined to the study of conflict and cooperation across households. When intact families were studied, early research treated parenting as equivalent to mothering. After fathering research emerged in the 1980s (see Lamb, 1987), researchers studied father-child relationships and mother-child relationships separately, looking for similarities, differences, and unique contributions, while generally ignoring the interaction between mothers and fathers. This gap is especially striking in light of the outpouring of research on marital communication during the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Fitzpatrick, 1988; Gottman, 1979).
