Parenting
Maternal Knowledge | Maternal Perceptions | Maternal Age | Siblings
Bornstein, Hahn, Haynes, Hendricks, Leach, Painter, Suwalsky
The CFRS is broadly concerned with analyzing and understanding the roles of parenting in human development. Dr. Bornstein is the Founding Editor of the journal Parenting: Science and Practice. He has edited the 5-volume Handbook of Parenting (2002), and has 8 volumes published, in press or in production in the Monographs in Parenting Series.
Mother's Knowledge of Child Behavior and Development
Parent's knowledge about child development and childrearing is relevant to pediatric practice, parent-child interactions, and child development. In one study, we investigated parenting knowledge in two groups (Japanese and South American) of immigrant mothers to the United States. Immigrant mothers scored about 70% on the evaluation of parenting knowledge,significantly lower than U.S. Mothers. The majority of immigrant mother's incorrect answers were to questions about normative child development. Parents' knowledge is relevant to pediatricians' evaluations of the health and welfare of children as understood by their parents. Gaps in parenting knowledge have implications for clinical interactions with parents, child diagnosis, pediatric training, and parent education. Parenting knowledge is vital to parents' evaluation of their children's behaviors and development and to parents' everyday decisions about their children's behaviors and development and to parents' everyday decisions about their children's care. We also studied parenting knowledge in a sample of Brazilian mothers and fathers. The average knowledge score obtained by mothers was significantly greater than the average score obtained by fathers. Mothers and fathers in the same family were correlated in their parenting knowledge. For mothers, education and child age predicted knowledge score, but for fathers only education predicted knowledge score.
Mother's Perceptions of Themselves as Parents
In an empirical study, we used an ecological framework to examine the roles of multiple contributors to variation in key maternal perceptions of their own parenting. Maternal SES, employment, and parenting support, child gender, language, social competence, and temperament, and maternal intelligence, personality, and parenting knowledge and style were explored in separate predictions of self perceived competence, satisfaction, investment, and role balance in over 230 European American mothers of firstborn 20-month olds. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated highly differentiated patterns of unique predictive relations to each domain of self-perceived parenting. Nonetheless, some predictors consistently contributed to individual parenting self-perceptions (most prominently parenting knowledge and dissonance between actual and ideal maternal and parental parenting styles). SES, maternal employment, community support, and maternal personality also contributed to self-perceptions, as did child temperament. Although the potential contributors to parenting self-perceptions may be many, prominent contributors to any one self-perception are few, and constellations of contributors differ for different parenting self-perceptions, conclusions that articulate with the modular view of parenting.
Maternal Age in Relation to Mothering Behavior
The role of maternal age across practically the full range feasible (13 – 47 years) was investigated in mothers of 5-month-olds and mothers of 20-month-olds. Few differences emerged in the way mothers behaved with their 5-month-old infants. Mothers of all ages were generally similar in their nurturing behaviors, encouragement of motor skills, social exchange, didactic interactions, and material provisions for their infants. As maternal age increased, however, so did mothers' frequency and duration of speech, and maternal sensitivity and structuring in interactions with her infant. Maternal age was also related to a number of perinatal history and social support variables. When there was a significant relation with maternal age, there was often a linear trend through the teens and 20s and the trend line then flattened in the 30s and 40s. In mothers of 20-month-olds, maternal age was generally related to more parenting satisfaction, less limit setting, more parenting knowledge, higher internal and external parenting attributions of failure, longer utterance and more vocabulary in speech to children, and more praise and expressions of physical affection. However, like the 5-month findings, differing patterns of relations were evident when the sample was split into 2 groups of under 28 years and 28 years or older (at birth). For younger mothers, relations between maternal age and beliefs and behaviors were generally larger than relations found in the full sample. For older mothers, maternal age was only associated with greater satisfaction and the use of more different words in speaking to their children.
Sequential analysis can be used to describe patterns of behavior in real time and help to explain behavior by assessing contingency. It is the analysis of temporal patterns in sequentially recorded events or behaviors of individuals or groups and offers a dynamic approach to the study of behaviors engendered by social interactions. We used sequential analysis to explore the concept of temporal contingency of maternal and infant vocalizations and to compare adolescent and adult mothers. When their infants were 5 months old, adolescent mothers and adult mothers were videotaped for 3000 s in naturalistic observation at home. Mutually exclusive and exhaustive behavioral codes to evaluate several domains of mother infant interaction, focusing on vocalization, were coded online as timed sequential data, wherein the time unit was 0.1 s. As far as base rates of vocalizations were concerned, adolescent mothers spoke less to their infants, and male infants vocalized nondistress more than female infants. Results of analysis of variance showed that, in general, mothers and infants vocalized contingently in response to each other's vocalizations. For female infants, adult mothers vocalized more contingently than adolescent mothers. However, contingency of infant nondistress vocalization did not differ between adolescent and adult mothers. That is, when mothers vocalized, adolescent mothers were equally likely to evoke contingent infant nondistress vocalization as were adult mothers. These results contribute to our understanding of adolescent parenting and show that introducing temporality into research questions of contingency yields greater insight into the dynamics of mother infant interaction.
Mothers of Siblings
In order to explore differences in the impact of parenting on sibling development, we undertook a multivariate within family study of maternal parenting beliefs and behaviors and sibling socioemotional behaviors with first- and secondborns. Mothers and their firstborns participated when their firstborn children were 20 months old, and the same mothers participated in the same study protocol with their secondborns when they were 20 months old. Despite children's development and structural changes in the family, most maternal beliefs did not change in their mean level (with the exception of parenting knowledge which increased), and maternal beliefs were consistently stable between children. Similarly, group mean levels of maternal social behaviors in interaction with their first and secondborn children did not change. However, contrary to maternal beliefs, the stability of maternal social behaviors across time was low. Whereas mothers may be consistent in the social domain of parenting, their children appeared to differ somewhat in socioemotional development.