Poster #130 - Assessing longitudinal pathways between mother-to-infant bond and infant temperament

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Maternal bonding, described as the affective tie from a mother to her child, is considered as important factor in child development, but relevant empirical studies are scarce (Fuchs, Mohler, Reck, Resch, & Kaess, 2016). The few studies that have assessed relations between maternal bonding and child temperament have assumed a child-to-mother effect, but have employed regression analyses of cross-sectional data (Edhborg, Matthiesen, Lundh, & Widstrom, 2005; Nolvi et al., 2016; Parfitt, Ayers, Pike, Jessop, & Ford, 2014), leaving the direction of causality ambiguous. The current study addresses this shortcoming, examining longitudinal relations between maternal bonding and child temperament within the first year of the child’s life, using a cross-lagged panel model to account for potential mutual effects between these two variables.

Hypotheses: We expected child difficult temperament to affect negatively maternal bonding. Although there are no studies examining parent-to-child effects, we hypothesized that maternal bonding would affect maternal perceptions of child temperament.

Study population: Women (n = 281) were recruited from five maternity hospitals in a Central European country during prenatal medical checks. The study sample included women with no birth complications, with singleton pregnancies and healthy full-term children.

Methods: Data was collected in the first week (T1), 6 weeks (T2) and 9 months (T3) after the child’s birth. Child temperament was measured at T2 and T3 using the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire (ICQ) (Bates, Freeland, & Lounsbury, 1979). Maternal bonding was measured using the Mother-to-Infant Bonding Scale (Taylor, Atkins, Kumar, Adams, & Glover, 2005) at T1 and T2, and with the Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire (Brockington, Fraser, & Wilson, 2006) at T3). In the structural equation examining mutual longitudinal relations, temperament and bonding were treated as latent traits, with each measure parceled into subscales (cf. Little, Cunningham, Shahar, Widaman, 2002).

Results: As shown in Figure 1, bonding and temperament were stable across the three time points. Impaired bonding at T1 was predictive of difficult temperament at T2. Difficult temperament at T2 was associated with increasingly impaired bonding at T3, but T2 bonding was not associated with more difficult T3 temperament. Concurrent relations between impaired bonding and difficult temperament were found at T2, but not T3.

Conclusions: A poor maternal bond in the first week postpartum is associated with mothers perceiving their child as difficult several weeks later, but does not continue to influence perceived temperament over the rest of the first year. Difficult temperament in the second month, however, does contribute to problems with later maternal bonding. Although the lack of a concurrent relation between bonding and temperament 9 months postpartum suggests that bonding and temperament become disentangled in later infancy, our results suggest dynamic associations between children’s characteristics and close relationships across the first year.

Authors

• Filip Smolik, Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences
  Presenting Author

• Lea Takács, Charles University, Czech Republic
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sam Putnam, Bowdoin College
  Non-Presenting Author