Parents’ Nonattuned Mind-Mindedness Moderates the Association between Infants’ Difficult Temperament and Parental Future Power Assertion

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Do difficult children elicit more power-assertive parenting? This is a classic question in developmental psychology. Ever since Bell (1968) emphasized the role of child effects in socialization, research has shown that children with more difficult temperaments (prone to anger, irritable, hard to manage) are more likely to receive power-assertive discipline from parents, which in turn can lead to poor socialization outcomes (Dishion & Patterson, 2006; Lipscomb et al., 2011; Lorber & Egeland, 2011).
Recently, however, research has increasingly demonstrated that multiple factors can moderate those effects, emphasizing the need for a more nuanced approach. Kochanska, Boldt, and Goffin (2019) argued that the parent’s cognitive representations of the child can serve as a powerful moderator of the link between child difficulty and parental power-assertive control. Specifically, parents’ capacity for mind-mindedness (MM) – perceiving the child as a psychological agent with their own mental states – can be particularly important (McMahon & Bernier, 2017). Parents with poor MM abilities are likely to interpret child difficulty as deliberate and hostile, and respond with increased power assertion, whereas parents with high MM abilities are less likely to do so.
We tested this model in an ongoing longitudinal study of 200 community families (mothers, fathers, and children). Child difficult temperament was behaviorally coded in scripted paradigms eliciting anger and discomfort (e.g., brief physical restraint, frustration, exposure to a cold object); multiple expressions of anger were aggregated. Parents’ MM was coded behaviorally in a10-min snack context. Each comment to the infant was transcribed; mind-minded comments were further coded as appropriate or nonattuned (inaccurate, not appropriate, misrepresenting the infant’s state). We focused on these latter comments, as they were implicated in dysfunctional parent-child relationships (Meins, Bureau, & Fernyhough, 2018). Following McMahon and Newey (2018), we created a dichotomous nonattuned MM score: “never used”, 109 mothers, 115 fathers, and “used once or more”, 91 mothers, 85 fathers. Parental power assertion was behaviorally coded at 15-17 months in a 10-minute toy cleanup task. All contexts were parallel for mother- and father-child dyads.
In multiple regressions, we modeled child difficulty as the predictor, nonattuned MM comments as the moderator, and parental power-assertive control as the outcome variable. Child gender was covaried. In mother-child dyads, there was a significant expected interaction between child difficulty and nonattuned MM comments, F(1,188) = 5.42, p < .05, B = 3.62, SE = 1.56, 95% CI [.55, 6.69]. Simple slopes revealed that more difficult infants received more maternal power assertion, but only if the mothers had made nonattuned comments in infancy, B =2.45, SE = 1.08, p < .05. In the dyads in which mothers had not made nonattuned comments to their infants, child difficulty was unrelated to maternal power assertion, B = -1.17, SE = 1.12, ns. In father-child dyads, there was no significant interaction between child difficulty and MM nonattuned comments. These results suggest that parents’ social cognition can be a source of increased risks for harsh parenting, particularly for difficult, challenging children. Consequently, parental representations of children are potentially an important target for interventions.

Authors

• Robin J Campbell, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Danming An, Lehigh University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Neevetha Sivagurunathan, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicole C. Yeager, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Grazyna Kochanska, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author