Adolescent Precursors of Parenting Self-Efficacy: A Longitudinal Preconception Cohort Study

Parenting self-efficacy – parents’ beliefs in their ability to positively influence their children’s behavior and development – is a key antecedent of parental functioning and child well-being. Although concurrent parental, child, and contextual factors have been associated with parenting self-efficacy, its developmental origins prior to the transition to parenthood remain poorly understood. Using prospective, multiple-generation data, we examined whether adolescent family-of-origin characteristics including general self-efficacy, family structure, and parent-child relationship quality predict later parenting self-efficacy in emotional availability during toddlerhood. We further tested whether interparental relationship quality shortly after childbirth mediated or moderated these associations. Data were drawn from the Dutch longitudinal cohort TRacking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS) and its intergenerational follow-up TRAILS NEXT. The analytic sample included 276 parents (75% mothers) with assessments of family structure and parent-child relationship quality at age 16, general self-efficacy at age 19, interparental relationship quality at three months postpartum, and parenting self-efficacy when the firstborn child was approximately 30 months old. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that higher adolescent general self-efficacy predicted greater parenting self-efficacy in emotional availability 10-15 years later. In contrast, post-separation or single-parent family structures and parental angry outbursts, guilt induction, and problem solving in adolescence were not directly associated with later parenting self-efficacy. Interparental relationship quality did not mediate this association, and moderation effects were not robust after correction for multiple testing. These findings suggest that general self-efficacy established in adolescence can serve as a long-term developmental precursor of later parenting self-efficacy among both mothers and fathers.