Parent informants for child personality: agreement, discrepancies, and clinical utility

A long-standing issue in child clinical research is the integration of various informants, but this topic has not been comprehensively applied to the domain of child personality. Mothers and fathers rated their children (N = 346) on personality traits and behavioral problems. Mother-father agreement was highest for Conscientiousness and lowest for Neuroticism and Agreeableness. Each parent's ratings added incremental variance in predicting behavioral problems, and mother-father discrepancy predicted internalizing problems. These results suggest that both parents should be used as informants in child personality assessment and discrepancies might reflect meaningful variance with clinical utility.