Poster #136 - Evaluating Associations Between Parental Mind-Mindedness and Child Developmental Outcomes Through Meta-Analysis

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Parental mind-mindedness (MM) is defined as a caregiver’s proclivity to view their child as having an autonomous mind and capability to accurately infer the mental states driving their child’s behavior (Meins, 1997; Meins, 2013). After it was initially proposed as a construct to better predict the quality of parent-child relationships, the last 20 years has witnessed a growing number of studies investigating possible benefits of high degrees of MM to various aspects of children’s social/cognitive development. A recent comprehensive narrative review (McMahon & Bernier, 2017) summarized these findings but was unable to gauge the effect sizes of parental MM in various relationships beyond what was revealed in individual studies. To date, meta-analytical analyses regarding MM, while capable of alleviating this concern, are sparse and have only recently examined its relationship to Theory-of-mind (Devine & Hughes, 2016) and attachment security (Zeegers et al., 2017).
Using the CMA program (Comprehensive Meta-Analysis, 2014), we examined the degree to which parental MM impacts children’s development beyond the well-established attachment-security connection (Meins et al., 2012). Inclusion criteria included studies reporting associations between a child’s developmental outcome and parental MM (measured through observations of parent-child interactions or with the describe-your-child interview [Meins et al., 1998, 2001]), and coded following the coding scheme of Meins & Fernyhough (2015). The literature search revealed 37 publications concerning five outcome domains, however multiple publications resulted from the same sample of families with some overlap in reported results. Thus, we analyzed the data at the level of samples as well as comparisons.
Under the random effects model, the 20 samples had a small mean effect size, r = .19, 95% CI [0.13, 0.26], indicating the expected positive relationship between parental MM and children’s developmental outcomes. At the level of comparisons (134), the overall effect size remained small but significant, r = .16, 95% CI [0.13, 0.19]. However, the effects were heterogeneous across samples, Q(19) = 29.26, p = .06, I2 = 35.06, and comparisons, Q(133) = 271.17, p < .001, I2 = 50.95. Given the amount of heterogeneity in the data set, we examined moderators at the level of comparisons.
As shown in Table 1, small effect sizes were observed for studies including measures of executive functioning (e.g., inhibitory control, nonverbal reasoning), language/communication (e.g., expressive and receptive vocabulary, syntactic understanding), and Theory-of-mind/Social-cognition (e.g., false belief, emotion understanding). In contrast, effect sizes for studies including measures of children’s behavioral difficulties or academic competence were negligible and failed to reach statistical significance. Despite these trends, the effect of child outcome domain was not significant. Additional moderator analyses revealed evidence of publication bias and significant effects of how MM was assessed and scored, as well as characteristics of both parent and child (see Table 2). Results from the current meta-analysis call into question the role of parental MM in children’s development apart from attachment security. Given the burgeoning literature in this area, however, these findings have the potential to inform future studies designed to evaluate how parental mentalization influences children’s ongoing development.

Authors

• Naomi J. Aldrich, Grand Valley State University
  Presenting Author

• Jing Chen, Grand Valley State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alysha Burd, Grand Valley State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Louis Alfieri, Robomatter, Inc.
  Non-Presenting Author