Presented data on marital satisfaction, parenting style and conversational behaviour of parents show that qualities of the family environment affect men and women as marital partners, and these marital factors are in turn important mediators of the quality of the relationships between each parent and the child. The conversational behaviour of fathers seems to be sensitive to such variables as parenting style and level of marital satisfaction, while mothers display greater consistency. The relationchip between parental language behaviour and gender-based differentiation of boys and girls and the mediation of this relationship by the variable of marital satisfaction has important implications for the study of child development.