Parental Involvement as an Etiological Moderator of Middle Childhood Oppositional Defiant Disorder

The goal of this study was to investigate parental involvement as an etiologic moderator of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) during middle childhood. Previous studies examining the influence of genetic and environmental factors on ODD have not considered whether and how these factors might vary by parental involvement. We thus conducted a series of "latent genetic by measured environmental" interaction analyses, in which measured parental involvement was allowed to moderate genetic, shared, and nonshared environmental influences on child ODD. Participants include 1,027 twin pairs (age ranged from 6 to 11 years old) from the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Results did indeed suggest that the etiology of ODD varies with maternal involvement, such that genetic influence on ODD became more prominent as maternal involvement decreased. However, these results were specific to children's perceptions of maternal involvement and did not extend to maternal perceptions of her involvement. There was no evidence that paternal involvement moderated the etiology of ODD, regardless of informant. The different results found in twins' and parents' data are consistent with those in previous research showing that children may have different perceptions from parents' about their family relationships and that this discrepancy needs to be taken into account in future research.