What Benefits do Mothers Gain from Maternal Attunement? A Five-Wave Dyadic Study Across Preadolescence

• In Event: Factors Influencing Parenting Quality

Abstract

Objectives. Parental attunement (Stern, 1985), though crucial for youth, is effortful and not trivial to achieve or maintain, especially when parents navigate their many commitments within and outside parenting (e.g., work, marriage). A key unexplored question is what drives and reinforces parental attunement, despite its effortful nature. This study explored what affective benefits (if any) mothers gain by being attuned to a preadolescent child, and, in turn, whether these benefits help mothers maintain attuned caring.

Methods. We used a six-wave longitudinal investigation to test the bi-directional temporal associations between child-reported maternal attunement and mothers’ self-reported well-being, including mood and self-esteem. Our sample included 202 ethnically-diverse mother [Mage at baseline=40.1 years (SD=6.1] and child [Mage at baseline=10.1 (SD=.90), 51% girls] dyads. We used five 7-day waves of Ecological Momentary Assessment, with each wave separated by 6 months. Up to eight random times per day mothers reported on two state-level positive emotions (PE; happy, calm/relaxed) and three negative emotions (NE; angry, sad, stress) and state-level perceived stress, using two items. During each wave, children provided reports of mothers’ attunement using the Child’s View Questionnaire (Margolin, 2000). We used a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) to test within- and between-person effects. We tested associations between maternal attunement and negative and positive emotions in one model, and between maternal attunement and perceived stress in a second model.

Results. At the within-person level, increased NE was negatively associated with maternal attunement within the same wave, and increased attunement in a given wave predicted mothers’ decreased negative emotions in the next. Same wave or across wave associations with PE or perceived stress were weak and non-significant. At the between-person level, average levels of maternal attunement did not significantly correlate with average levels of PE or NE or with perceived stress (see Figure 1, Panels A and B). Results were largely unchanged when we controlled for child sex, maternal global perceived stress, and mothers’ reported child internalized or externalized problems.

Conclusions. Our results suggest increased sensitive caring for an adolescent child is associated with less distress for mothers. This suggests a reinforcing mechanism of maternal sensitive caring. However, given the weak associations between maternal attunement and mothers’ positive emotions and perceived stress, the challenge for future studies with larger samples would be to capture different clusters of mothers with different perceived benefits of sensitive parenting (or the lack thereof). It is also plausible that more robust and comprehensive benefits of sensitive parenting accrue across longer time frames. Specifically, pre- and early adolescence years are especially stressful for parents (Putnick et al., 2010), and thus the emotional benefits of sensitive parenting for mothers might appear in later developmental periods.

Authors

• Reout Arbel, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Genevieve Dunton, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California

• Tyler Mason, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California