The Association Between Marital Power and Adolescents’ Social Adjustment: The Mediating Role of Co-Parenting

This study investigated how marital power influence adolescents’ social adjustment in China, based on a sample of 759 middle school students. While prior research has largely focused on marital relationships and co-parenting, few studies have examined adolescent adjustment through the lens of marital power. Using latent profile analysis in Mplus, four marital power types were identified: shared power, contested power, wife-dominant, and husband-dominant. Shared-power families represented the largest proportion and reported the highest levels of couple satisfaction with power distribution. Different marital power structures were significantly associated with distinct adolescent social adjustment outcomes. Adolescents from shared-power families exhibited significantly higher levels of self, interpersonal, behavioral, and environmental adjustment compared to those from the other three family types. They also demonstrated better functional outcomes, characterized by higher positive adjustment and lower negative adjustment levels, particularly in contrast to adolescents from contested-power and husband-dominant families. Notably, contested-power families were associated with the poorest adjustment across all domains. To further investigate the underlying mechanisms, mediation analyses showed that perceived marital power—by both husbands and wives—positively predicted adolescents’ positive adjustment and negatively predicted maladjustment. Furthermore, parental co-parenting quality emerged as a statistically significant partial mediator, suggesting that marital power influences adolescent adjustment in part by fostering more unified parenting practices, which in turn enhance adolescent social adjustment.