Abstract
Currently, intimate partner violence (IPV) constitutes a major public health issue and those women experiencing IPV in the context of motherhood have to face additional challenges related to parenting. Literature on how IPV impact on maternal parenting characteristics is controversial and the role of maternal depression on parenting in the context of IPV is still understudied. The current preliminary study included 61 Italian women victims of IPV who completed an online questionnaire. We tested a path-analysis model in which IPV was expected to explain parental practices and stress through the mediation of maternal depression. Our results showed that depressive symptoms in mothers mediated the relationships between IPV and higher engagement in maternal inconsistent discipline and higher parental stress. Findings supported the spillover hypothesis and, at the same time, suggest the need to consider another important factor in the link between IPV and parenting that is mothers’ mental health. It emerged the need to take care of women victims of IPV and also fostering parenting skills and strategies.
Introduction
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2015) defines Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) as abuse or aggression that occurs in a romantic relationship where the “intimate partner” refers to both current and former spouses and dating partners. It includes psychological, physical, and sexual violence and stalking. World Health Organization (WHO, 2013) reported that one in three women experience intimate partner violence throughout their lifetime.
Currently, IPV constitutes a major public health issue and a violation of women’s human rights that requires preventive and supportive interventions for victims, women in most cases (WHO, 2014, 2019). Moreover, those women experiencing IPV in the context of motherhood have to face additional challenges, such as developing effective parental practices to ensure their children’s well-being while facing the consequences of IPV (e.g., Sousa et al., 2022).
The literature did not provide univocal results about the association between IPV and maternal parenting quality, as shown by the review of Chiesa et al. (2018). Some studies showed an association between IPV and negative parenting in victimized mothers, including harsh discipline, physical/verbal aggressions, or ineffective parenting (e.g., Casanueva et al., 2008; Levendosky et al., 2006), which, in turn, may lead to poorer children’s adjustment (e.g., Rea & Rossman, 2005). A recent study also provides evidence that the relationship between IPV exposure and dysfunctional parenting could be mediated by parental stress in mothers (Sypher et al., 2022). These results are consistent with the spillover hypothesis, which affirms that emotions and moods generated in a woman’s adult intimate relationship can flow into other significant relationships. For example, conflictual behaviors between parents may spill over into their behaviors toward children, with a negative impact on their parenting and educational practices (e.g., Camisasca et al., 2016; Grasso et al., 2016; Levendosky et al., 2000).
Conversely, some studies reported positive parenting behaviors in victimized women supporting the hypothesis that women tend to offer higher nurturing and protection to their children to compensate for the potential effects of violence exposure (e.g., Holden et al., 1998; Letourneau et al., 2007).
The relationship between IPV and negative psychological outcomes for victims’ mental health has been well demonstrated (e.g., Dokkedahl et al., 2022; Lagdon et al., 2014), these mainly included post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression. In particular, the systematic review and meta-analysis by Beydoun et al. (2012) showed that women exposed to IPV are at a greater risk of developing depression (i.e., major depressive disorder, depressive symptoms, and postpartum depression) relative to non-exposed women.
Literature shows that mothers with significant depressive symptoms tend to engage in less than optimal parenting practices, such as harsh parenting and intrusiveness, both in the short term and long term (e.g., Wolford et al., 2019). Indeed, a study (Turney, 2011) found a strong link between maternal depression and parental neglect, psychological aggression, and physical assault. Review and meta-analytic studies indeed reported associations of maternal depression with negative maternal behaviors (e.g., harsh parenting, intrusiveness) and with disengagement from the child (Goodman et al., 2020; Lovejoy et al., 2000). Moreover, the timing of depression may moderate this relationship: current depression, rather than prior depression, was associated with the strongest effects on parenting (Lovejoy et al., 2000).
Furthermore, depression was found to mediate the relationship between a woman’s history of trauma and parenting in terms of decreased parental satisfaction, reports of child neglect, and use of physical punishment (Banyard et al., 2003). In line with these findings, the study of Renner (2009) showed that depressive symptoms in mothers were a partial mediator of the relationship between psychological IPV victimization and parenting stress, supporting that prior experience may have consequences on a mother’s mental health which, in turn, affect maternal parenting.
Despite this evidence, the topic of how IPV impacts maternal parenting characteristics and stress as mediated by depression is still understudied. Also, to our knowledge, there are no studies carried out in Italy focusing on this aspect.
Therefore, the present study, advancing the current literature, aims to investigate the link between IPV and both parental practices (i.e., involvement, positive parenting, monitoring and supervision, inconsistent discipline, and use of corporal discipline) and parenting stress also examining the role of depressive symptoms as a potential mediator of this relationship.
Method
Participant and Procedure
Participants included 61 women aged 18 to 58 years (M = 36.39, SD = 7.75). 77% of the participants are Italian and the majority of them showed a middle socio-economic status (this was assessed by asking directly the personnel of the Antiviolence centers, the survey did not include specific items about SES). We could not collect more data about potential risk factors for IPV related to being part of a minority (e.g., having a disability or a clinical condition, religion) due to limitations in data inquiry that were required by Antiviolence centers. The mean age of the children was 4.56 years (SD = 3.60). The original sample included 76 women, but 15 were excluded from the analyses due to missing data.
Antiviolence centers and associations were contacted to present the research project and to establish a network for data collection. Centers, which approved the goals and methodologies of the research and agreed to participated, posted the hyperlink of the online survey on their web and social network pages. The hyperlink was also posted on the social network pages of groups of mothers. The survey was preceded by a letter of presentation about the study and the consent form to fill out. Data were anonymous, the participation was voluntary, and participants were free to withdraw from the study at any time. The inclusion criterion was being a mother of a child ranging in age from 1 to 14 years. The research project was approved by the Ethical Commission of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. All participants provided their informed consent and the procedure complies with all ethical principles of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2002) for the handling of human subjects and abides by the Helsinki Declaration.
Measures
Participants Were Administered an Online Questionnaire Investigating
Intimate Partner Violence Suffered by Mothers
It was measured through 16 items based on the Revised conflict tactics scale (CTS-2) short-form (Signorelli et al., 2014) and The Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory (PMWI; Tolman, 1999) short form to measure psychological aggression, physical assault, sexual coercion, physical injury, control, and economic violence. Cronbach’s alpha of this composite scale was α = .779.
Depressive Symptomatology
It was assessed through the PROMIS Emotional Distress-Depression Short Form (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013). It consists of 8 items on a 5 Likert scale. It assesses self-reported negative mood (i.e. sadness, guilt), views of self (i.e. self-criticism, worthlessness), and social cognition (i.e. loneliness, interpersonal alienation), as well as decreased positive affect and engagement (i.e. loss of interest, meaning, and purpose). Cronbach’s alpha was α = .929.
Parental Practices
They were measured through the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ; Esposito et al., 2016). The APQ is a 42-item measure assessing positive and negative parenting practices within five domains: involvement (α = .746), positive parenting (α = .733), poor monitoring and supervision (α = .497), inconsistent discipline (α = .635), and use of corporal discipline (α = .478). Participants rated on a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always), the frequency with which the parenting practices occurred in their home.
Parenting Stress
It was assessed through the Parenting Stress Index Short Form (PSI-SF; Guarino et al., 2008). It is a 36-item self-report questionnaire. It includes three sub-scales (i.e. Parental Distress, Parent–child dysfunctional interaction, and Difficult child) which yield a total parental stress score. For the present study, we only used the global parental score (α = .849).
Data Analysis
We conducted preliminary Spearman correlations between IPV, maternal depression, parental practices (i.e., APQ dimensions), and parental stress. We could not test the effect of ethnicity due to the limited number of non-Italian participants, which hindered testing different models of Italian and non-Italian samples. Then a path-analysis model with a mediation was tested using Amos Graphics 21. We started from the saturated model with all the direct and the mediated links and then we proceeded with a step-by-step process by removing the non-significant links among variables. To obtain a more parsimonious model, we employed a stepwise removal procedure that fitted the model, tested all the individual paths, and removed the path that obtained the smallest p-value in a significance test. The asymptotic distribution-free estimation method was used to address the non-normal distribution of the data (Jöreskog & Yang, 1996). Finally, Goodness-of-fit indexes were examined through the chi-square test, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), and comparative fit index (CFI).
Results
Table 1 shows means, standard deviations, and correlations among the investigated variables.
Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlations for IPV, Maternal Depression, Parental Practices, and Parental Stress.
p < .05. **p < .01.
Considering the preliminary correlations (see Table 1), we only included in the model inconsistent discipline and parental stress, which resulted to be correlated to IPV and maternal depression. Therefore, we specified a path-analysis model in which IPV was expected to explain inconsistent discipline and parental stress through the mediation of maternal depression.
As shown in Figure 1, IPV was found to indirectly explain both inconsistent parenting and parental stress through the mediation of maternal depression. The model presented excellent Goodness-of-fit indices: χ2(2) = .954 (p = .621), CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.000 (90% CI [0.000, 0.206]). Only significant paths are reported in Figure 1. Total effects are reported in Table 2.

The path-analysis model.
Total Effects.
Discussion
The focus of this brief note was to further investigate how IPV victimization in mothers may be related to both negative parental practices and parenting stress considering maternal depression as a mediator of this relationship.
Our results showed that IPV was indirectly related to worse parental functioning, with the mediation of maternal depressive symptoms onto negative parental practice, as specified by inconsistent discipline and higher parental stress. These results appeared to support the spillover hypothesis (Camisasca et al., 2016; Grasso et al., 2016; Levendosky et al., 2000), suggesting that feelings experienced within adult intimate relationships can affect other important relationships. However, our results enrich this hypothesis by adding an important factor that should be considered, which is mothers’ mental health. IPV, indeed, impacted maternal parenting only through the mediation of maternal depression. Therefore, experienced IPV is related to the development of depressive symptomatology in mothers which, in turn, is related to their inability to enforce rules consistently and the tendency to apply different punishments for the same behavior, thus resulting in an inconsistent parental discipline that can be confusing for the child. Moreover, in line with previous literature (Renner, 2009), the model showed that IPV victimization and maternal depression were related to another outcome that is parental stress which implies a higher perception in mothers that demands related to parenting were exceeding their resources, this, in literature, is associated with lower child adjustment (e.g., Barroso et al., 2018; Ward & Lee, 2020).
On the other hand, it should be noted that other aspects of parenting were relatively preserved even in the occurrence of IPV. More specifically, mothers did not engage in corporal discipline on their daughters and sons and were able to deploy good monitoring on the whereabouts of their offspring. These two parenting skills are also unrelated to depressive symptoms, highlighting that it is likely that depression has a deeper impact on the coherence of parenting (as shown by the results on inconsistent discipline), probably due to the psychological absorption of mothers caused by the symptoms. Literature shows that when depression is mediated by anger, the impact on parental skills in terms of corporal discipline is higher (Shay & Knutson, 2008). Moreover, as literature shows (Kohlhoff et al., 2016), most of the impact of IPV on parenting can be ascribed to the worsening of mental health and the decline in self-regulation capacities, caused by the experiencing of an acute episode of violence and in presence of the perpetrator.
These results on the whole support previous evidence concerning the negative influence of IPV on victimized mothers on both their well-being and mental health (Beydoun et al., 2012; Dokkedahl et al., 2022) and their engagement in ineffective parenting (e.g., Casanueva et al., 2008; Levendosky et al., 2006). Furthermore, our findings, despite the preliminary nature of the results, advance the current literature allowing us to adopt a wider perspective considering together IPV and maternal depression and their consequences on parenting.
The study presents some limitations. The cross-sectional nature of the study, indeed, does not allow us to infer a direct casual relation between predictor, mediator, and outcome variables; therefore, future longitudinal studies are needed. Second, all the measures used in the study and assessing sensitive information were self-reported; thus, they may be subject to social desirability. Moreover, reaching women with children in anti-violence centers is very difficult; thus, the number of women who decided to participate in the study is relatively small, which may limit generalizability.
Finally, our sample unfortunately does not cover the broad spectrum of diversity of conditions that may exacerbate the risk of being victims of IPV. Our participants, in fact, were mostly from middle-class socio-economic status and Italian ethnic groups. Therefore, the generalizability of our results for intersectional risk groups (e.g., ethnicity, disability, religion) is very limited. It should be noted, however, that SES has been shown in the literature to make little contribution to variance in parenting practices (Grogan-Kaylor et al., 2019).
Along with its limitations, we believe that this study provides interesting clues also for services working with victims of IPV. Findings, indeed, suggest the need to take care of the women who have experienced IPV not only as victims, which is extremely important for their psychological well-being, but also as mothers by promoting the process of resilience (e.g., Gonzalez-Mendez & Hamby, 2021), enhancing parenting skills and strategies aimed at reducing depressive symptoms in mothers and subsequently reduce parenting stress and inconsistent parenting. The effect of interventions seems to be higher if mothers and children are treated both separately (i.e., specific interventions for mothers and different specific interventions for children) and jointly (i.e., sessions of mother–child-directed interventions) as shown by Anderson and Van Ee (2018).
Footnotes
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: This paper was funded by Lombardy Region (Italy) with the grant: “Promozione di progetti e/o percorsi formativi nel sistema universitario lombardo sulle tematiche di prevenzione e contrasto alla violenza contro le donne, annualità 2023/2024” di cui alle dd.g.r. n. 550/2023 e n. 591/2023.”
Ethical Approval and Informed Consent Statements
This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethical Commission of the Department of Psychology of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano. Participants provide their consent to participate in the research.
