Multilevel Predictors of Maternal Nurturance to Distress and Beliefs about Infant Crying: Examining the Role of Household and Neighborhood Resources

• In Event: Early childhood parenting

Abstract

Parental responsiveness to infant distress is associated with positive child developmental outcomes, including greater attachment security, emotion regulation skills, and social and behavioral competence (Leerkes et al., 2012). Thus, it is important to investigate factors that may impede a parent’s ability to respond in a nurturing way to their infants’ distress. Theoretical models on parenting (Belsky, 1984) and child development (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) suggest that parenting is multiply determined by factors across multiple levels of the surrounding environments (e.g., characteristics of the parent, family, neighborhood, and cultural ideologies). This study examined whether household indicators of burden (i.e., low maternal education, single-parent status, young parenthood, financial need, and residential overcrowding) and neighborhood-level resources (i.e., distribution of educational, health/environmental, and socio/economic resources in a community) predicted parent-oriented beliefs about infant crying and observed maternal nurturance to infant distress.

Ninety-nine mothers (mean age = 28.99 years, SD = 5.41 at the time of their child’s birth) of 6- to 12- month-old infants (42.4% female) completed questionnaires assessing demographic characteristics and indicators of burden, as well as the Infant Crying Questionnaire (ICQ; Haltigan et al., 2012) during a home visit. Neighborhood resources were assessed using the Child Opportunity Index (COI; Acevedo et al., 2014), a publicly available measure designed to enumerate educational, health/environmental, and social/economic opportunities in a given neighborhood. Additionally, mother-infant interactions were filmed to assess maternal nurturance to infant distress using the NICHD Observational Record of the Caregiving Environment; NICHD ECCRN, 1996).

Using structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation (Muthén & Muthén, 2017), we examined the extent to which family-level burden and neighborhood resources predicted mother-reported beliefs about crying and observed nurturance to distress. In separate models, increased household burden was associated with both increased maladaptive beliefs about infant crying (β = .236, p = .049) and reduced nurturance to distress (β = -.468, p < .001). Reduced neighborhood resources was also associated with both increased maladaptive beliefs about infant crying (β = -.321, p = .013) and reduced nurturance to distress (β = .249, p = .015). When considered together, household burden was uniquely associated with maternal nurturance (β = -.436, p < .001), whereas neighborhood resources were uniquely associated with maladaptive beliefs about infant crying (β = -.276, p = .040).

This study is unique in testing predictors of parenting, assessed via both parent-report and observation, at multiple ecological levels. The results suggested that deprivation indicators at the household and neighborhood levels are associated with difficulties with parental responsiveness to infant distress. Implications for intervention include considering efforts at the family and neighborhood level to address multi-systemic disparities that families experience to promote greater parental responsiveness and subsequent positive child development. An important future direction will be to better understand the mechanisms that may explain the associations between stressors at both the family and neighborhood levels and parental nurturance, as these findings may offer insights into modifiable targets for intervention.

Authors

• Yukihiro Kitagawa, University of Oregon
  Presenting Author

• Daneele Thorpe, Stony Brook University

• Kristin L Bernard, Stony Brook University