Postpartum depressive symptoms constitute a common yet serious complication of pregnancy and childbirth, but research on its association with coparenting is scarce. Furthermore, although coparenting ...dynamics start forming prior to the child’s birth, no research has explored dyadic prenatal coparenting dynamics as a predictor of postpartum depressive symptoms. The current study assessed how dyadic prenatal coparenting behaviors predicted postpartum depressive symptoms in first-time parents. We conducted a dyadic mixed-method longitudinal study of 107 expectant couples with data collected prenatally, and at 3, 6, and 24 months post-birth. The results indicated that prenatal coparenting dyadic synchrony predicted low levels of depressive symptoms among first-time fathers 3 and 6 months after the birth, and a prenatal coparenting dynamic of dyadic negative escalation predicted high levels of depressive symptoms among first-time mothers at 3 and 24 months postpartum. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Children’s cognitive and language development is a central aspect of human development and has wide and long-standing impact. The parent-infant relationship is the chief arena for the infant to learn ...about the world. Studies reveal associations between quality of parental care and children’s cognitive and language development when the former is measured as maternal sensitivity. Nonetheless, the extent to which parental mentalizing – a parent’s understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of a child, and presumed to underlie sensitivity – contributes to children’s cognitive development and functioning, has yet to be thoroughly investigated. According to the epistemic trust theory, high mentalizing parents often use ostensive cues, which signal to the infant that they are perceived and treated as unique subjective beings. By doing so, parents foster epistemic trust in their infants, allowing the infant to use the parents a reliable source of knowledge to learn from. Until recently, parental mentalizing has been limited to verbal approaches and measurement. This is a substantial limitation of the construct as we know that understanding of intentionality is both non-verbal and verbal. In this investigation we employed both verbal and non-verbal, body-based, approaches to parental mentalizing, to examine whether parental mentalizing in a clinical sample predicts children’s cognitive and language development 12 months later. Findings from a longitudinal intervention study of 39 mothers and their infants revealed that parental embodied mentalizing in infancy significantly predicted language development 12 months later and marginally predicted child cognitive development. Importantly, PEM explained unique variance in the child’s cognitive and linguistic capacities over and above maternal emotional availability, child interactive behavior, parental reflective functioning, depression, ethnicity, education, marital status, and number of other children. The theoretical, empirical, and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
•This study introduces a novel procedure - the Inconsolable Doll Task- and is the first to observe prenatal coparenting behaviors during a stressful interaction context.•Co-parenting couples’ dynamic ...of negative escalation predicted the child’s cognitive development at 18-months.•These predictions remained significant when accounting for prenatal and postnatal assessments of playful coparental behavioral patterns and self-reported coparental perceptions, as well as when controlling for parental education.•The IDT can be useful in prevention and early intervention of expectant parents.
Studies have demonstrated that coparenting can be assessed prenatally through playful observational conditions, including simulated baby enactments. Regrettably, there is a lack of empirical research examining how prenatal coparenting under the emotional stress elicited by the distress of a simulated infant predicts children’s cognitive development. The current longitudinal study introduces a novel procedure—the Inconsolable Doll Task—to assess prenatal coparenting behavioral dynamics under the stress of a non-responsive doll simulator, and examines the extent to which prenatal interaction patterns predict the child’s cognitive development at 18 months. The sample consists of 105 community-based, co-living, expectant fathers and mothers. Data were collected prenatally, at three, six, and 18 months in home and lab visits. Results indicate that the prenatal coparenting dynamic of negative escalation explains a unique variance in children’s cognitive development at 18 months. This effect is evident even when accounting for both prenatal and postnatal assessments of low-stress coparenting behavioral patterns or self-reported coparenting perceptions, and when controlling for parental education. These findings are discussed in terms of their methodical, empirical, and clinical implications.
Parental mentalizing - the parent's ability to envision the child's mental states (such as desires, thoughts, or wishes) - has been argued to underlie a parent's ability to respond sensitively to ...their child's emotional needs, and thereby promote advantageous cognitive and socio-emotional development. Mentalizing is typically operationalized in terms of how parents talk to or about their infants. This work extends research on mentalizing by operationalizing parental mentalizing exclusively in terms of nonverbal, bodily based, interactive behavior, namely parental embodied mentalizing(PEM). The purpose of the current research was twofold: (1) to establish the reliability and validity of the PEM coding system; and (2) to evaluate whether such measurement predicts infant and child cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Assessing 200 mother-infant dyads at 6 months using the coding of PEM proved both reliable and valid, including predicting child attachment security at 15 and 36 months, and language abilities, academic skills, behavior problems, and social competence at 54 months, in many cases even after taking into consideration traditional measures of parenting, namely maternal sensitivity. Conceptual, empirical, and clinical implications are discussed.
Relations between two forms of parental mentalizing—maternal mind‐mindedness (appropriate and nonattuned mind‐related comments) and parental embodied mentalizing (PEM)—and their role in predicting ...infant attachment security were investigated. Maternal PEM and mind‐mindedness were assessed at 8 months (N = 206), and infant attachment security was assessed at 15 months. PEM was positively correlated with appropriate mind‐related comments and was unrelated to nonattuned mind‐related comments. Multinomial regression analyses showed that higher PEM distinguished between secure versus insecure–avoidant infants and between insecure–resistant versus insecure–avoidant infants over and above the contributions of appropriate and nonattuned mind‐related comments. These results suggest that both verbal and nonverbal indices of parental mentalizing make independent contributions in predicting the security of the infant–mother attachment relationship.
— Parental mentalizing—parents’ capacity to appreciate, even unconsciously, the infant’s mental states and their role in motivating behavior—is related to infant attachment security and other social ...and cognitive capacities. Yet virtually all current measurements of parental mentalizing rely on parents’ semantic and verbal expressions. Despite the demonstrated value of this approach, exclusive reliance on verbal processes may fail to fully capture interactive mentalizing processes. Reflecting an embodied relational perspective for investigating parent–infant interaction, this article introduces parental embodied mentalizing, which refers to parents’ capacity to (a) implicitly conceive, comprehend, and extrapolate the infant’s mental states from the infant’s whole‐body movement, and (b) adjust their own kinesthetic patterns accordingly. It concludes by outlining directions for future research.
Postpartum depression (PPD) is a common mental health complication of pregnancy and childbirth with long- and short-term consequences for the wellbeing and the functioning of parents. In particular, ...first-time parents seem to be at high risk for developing post-birth depressive symptoms as the transition to parenthood elevates stress and demands adjustment to significant changes. Prior research has mostly documented individual characteristics, such as prenatal depression and psychiatric history, as predictors of PPD, but much less is known about the potential contribution of interpersonal processes within relational contexts, such as the coparenting relationship, to PPD among first-time mothers and fathers. With evidence suggesting that coparenting dynamics start developing prior to the birth, it is imperative to consider characteristics of coparenting interaction behaviors as early as during pregnancy to identify such behaviors as risk or protective factors for PPD. In the current study, we explored one’s own (actor) and partner’s observed prenatal coparenting behaviors as predictors of mothers' and fathers' PPD. A mixed-method longitudinal study with 107 expectant couples provided both partners' self-report measures and observational data from interaction tasks prenatally, and at 3 and 6 months post-birth. APIM multilevel model analyses revealed that both negative (i.e., withdrawal and conflict) and positive (i.e., communication skills, support, and problem solving attempts) prenatal coparenting behaviors were uniquely predictive of PPD among first-time parents above and beyond other potential predictors of PPD, although several similarities and dissimilarities among fathers and mothers were detected.
Parental depression has significant implications for family functioning, yet much of the literature does not consider family-level dynamics in investigating individual, parenting and child outcomes. ...In the current study we apply a new index of couple-level support, partner reflective functioning (RF), or the romantic partner's ability to consider how the partner's mental states can guide behavior, to study familial resiliency in the face of prenatal parental depression among first-time parents. We investigate how partner RF buffers the association between prenatal parental depression and outcomes of postnatal parental depression, parenting style, and child effortful control. Maternal and paternal depression were measured in 91 primiparous couples during the sixth month of pregnancy and parental depression, partner RF, parental RF at 6 months postnatally. Outcomes of parental depression, permissive parenting, and children's effortful control were assessed 24 months postnatally. Results indicate that average and high levels of paternal partner (not parental) RF attenuate risk for maternal postnatal depression, maternal permissive parenting, and deficits in child effortful control. Implications are discussed from a family systems approach.
Importance: Play, children's central occupation, and playfulness, its behavioral manifestation, are the foci of occupational therapy intervention. However, information about the development of ...playfulness behavior and the role of cognitive function is limited. Objective: To explore the development of playfulness and its relation to cognitive functioning from infancy to toddlerhood. Design: Longitudinal study with data collected at ages 6 mo, 18 mo, and 24 mo. Setting: Laboratory (age 6 mo) and home (ages 12 and 18 mo). Participants: Eighty-six typically developing children drawn from a convenience sample of 109 low-risk families of middle to upper socioeconomic status. Measures: The Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) to assess cognitive functioning and the Test of Playfulness (ToP) to assess children's playfulness. Results: ToP scores were significantly higher at age 24 mo than at age 6 mo, t(88) = -60.30, p < .001,95% confidence interval (CI) -1.47, -1.38. Correlation analysis revealed that the more playful the infant was at age 6 mo, the higher their cognitive functioning was at age 18 mo and the more playful they were at age 24 mo. Toddlers with higher cognitive performance at age 18 mo demonstrated more playful behavior at age 24 mo (beta = 0.120, SE = 0.05, 95% CI 0.0377, -0.2276). Conclusions and Relevance: Children's playfulness is evident as early as age 6 mo and continues to develop through toddlerhood, depending on their cognitive growth. Occupational therapists play a key role in working with families with young children, promoting cognitive development to further the development of playfulness behaviors. What This Article Adds: Understanding the development of playfulness and exploring its relationship with cognitive functioning in typically developing children fills important gaps in occupational therapy knowledge and contributes to delivery of early intervention, especially when cognition or playfulness are at risk. Our findings confirmed that cognitive functioning contributes to the development of playfulness.
•Parental mentalizing may have verbal and embodied (PEM) factors.•Examining how parental mentalizing relates to parental stress and coparenting.•Verbal and embodied facets of parental mentalizing ...were associated.•Higher PEM was associated with lower parental stress mediated by coparenting.•Findings suggest that PEM is related to parenting experiences
Parental mentalizing—recognizing that children are separate psychological entities, who have their own thoughts, wishes, and intentions that motivate their behaviors—is traditionally considered a verbal, linguistic capacity. This paper aimed to examine the relation between parental verbal mentalizing (parental reflective function; PRF) and its nonverbal form—parental embodied mentalizing (PEM)—and how both constructs contribute to parents’ subjective experience of parenting, namely parental stress and coparental alliance. 68 mothers and their three-months-old babies were observed to assess PEM, interviewed to code PRF, and completed self-reports of coparental alliance and parental stress. PEM was found to be positively correlated with PRF. Mediation analyses revealed that higher PEM, but not PRF, was associated with lower parental stress, mediated by positive reports of coparental alliance. The findings support adopting a multifaceted approach when studying parental mentalizing, both in terms of assessing parental mentalizing beyond its verbal expressions to include also embodied aspects, as well as investigating its impact beyond infant development to include the familial context within it operates. Conceptual, empirical and clinical implications are discussed.
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