Therapeutic work to enhance parental mentalizing for parents with ACEs to support their children's mental health: A theoretical and clinical review.

This review outlines the literature concerning the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on parenting, focusing on how childhood trauma in parents might impede the development of adaptive parental mentalizing skills. Non-adaptive parental mentalizing may lead to non-mentalizing cycles between parents and children, which can put the child's mental health at risk. When parents who have endured ACEs have to cope with their children's mental health problems, they may have to deal with a double dose of parental stress related to their own traumatic history and their children's emotional difficulties.

Links between mothers' ACEs, their psychopathology and parenting, and their children's behavior problems-A mediation model.

Introduction: Children of mothers with a history of adverse childhoods are at greater risk of behavior problems. However, the mechanisms through which a mother's early adverse experiences (ACEs) are transmitted to her children need further study. Our goal was to examine a conceptual mediational model linking mothers' ACEs, maternal psychopathology symptoms, and parenting behaviors with children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors sequentially.

Mediation-Moderation Links Between Mothers' ACEs, Mothers' and Children's Psychopathology Symptoms, and Maternal Mentalization During COVID-19.

Research has suggested adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as a transdiagnostic risk factor for a variety of affective disorders. They are also linked with a parent's tendency toward affect dysregulation and hyperarousal, which may interfere with parenting and children's wellbeing. On the other hand, maternal mentalization can serve as a moderating factor that can help parents regulate their arousal, shielding children during adverse circumstances.

Parental Reflective Functioning as a Moderator of the Link Between Prematurity and Parental Stress.

We examined group differences between parents, both mothers and fathers, of premature and full-term infants to determine whether they differed in their reports of subjective parenting stress and in their level of parental reflective functioning (PRF). We also tested whether each parent's reflective functioning moderated the links between birth status (prematurity vs. full-term) and parenting stress.

COVID-19, child's behavior problems, and mother's anxiety and mentalization: A mediated moderation model.

We examined the direct and indirect links between COVID-19, maternal anxiety symptoms, and child behavior problems as well as the mediation-moderation links of mothers' anxiety symptoms and mentalization skills with the prediction of child behavior problems. A sample of 140 Israeli mothers with preschool children comprised the study's two groups: A COVID-19 group ( = 53), recruited shortly after the pandemic outbreak, and a pre-COVID-19 group (n = 87), recruited prior to the pandemic. Mothers completed online questionnaires regarding their own anxiety symptoms (BSI anxiety subscale) and their children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors (CBCL).

Mediation of Mothers' Anxiety and Parenting in Children's Behavior Problems during COVID-19.

The outbreak of COVID-19 is affecting the lives of millions of families around the world. The current study was carried out in Israel, following the pandemic's initial outbreak and during the resulting enforced quarantine, confining parents and children to their homes. A sample of 141 Israeli mothers with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 12 ( = 6.

Mothers' parental mentalization, attachment dimensions and mother-infant relational patterns.

We examined the links between mothers' prenatal attachment dimensions, parental mentalization and mother-infant relational patterns. The sample consisted of 68 mother-infant dyads. During pregnancy, mothers reported on attachment-related anxiety and avoidance.

Mediating and moderating links between coparenting, parental mentalization, parents' anxiety, and children's behavior problems.

The goal of this study is to integrate family systems theory, reflected in the construct of coparenting, with the attachment theory's concept of mentalization and how they are linked with children's behavior problems. We investigate the direct, indirect, and moderating links between mothers' and fathers' perceived coparenting, parental mentalization, and children's externalizing and internalizing behavior in the context of parents' general anxiety. Our sample consists of 78 cohabiting, heterosexual Israeli couples and their 3- to 5-year-old children.

Factors contributing to continuity and discontinuity in child psychopathology from infancy to childhood: An explorative study.

This study examined the psychopathology and socioemotional functioning of school-aged children treated during infancy and a comparison group of children without symptoms or treatment history. Our goal was to identify the factors associated with the continuity of psychopathology from infancy to childhood. The sample comprised 54 Israeli children, 30 with treatment history as infants in an infant mental health clinic and 24 with no treatment history.

Social anxiety and sensitivity to social-rank features in male faces.

Background And Objectives: Evolutionary theories propose that socially anxious individuals are especially sensitive to social-rank signals, presumably at the expense of the attunement to signals of affiliation. Despite this theoretical claim, few empirical attempts examined the association between social anxiety (SA) and sensitivity to specific features of social-rank and affiliation. This study aims to fill this gap.

The importance of parental verbal and embodied mentalizing in shaping parental experiences of stress and coparenting.

Parental mentalizing-recognizing that children are separate psychological entities, who have their own thoughts, wishes, and intentions that motivate their behaviors-is traditionally considered a verbal, linguistic capacity. This paper aimed to examine the relation between parental verbal mentalizing (parental reflective function; PRF) and its nonverbal form-parental embodied mentalizing (PEM)-and how both constructs contribute to parents' subjective experience of parenting, namely parental stress and coparental alliance. 68 mothers and their three-months-old babies were observed to assess PEM, interviewed to code PRF, and completed self-reports of coparental alliance and parental stress.

Early Parental Adaptation, Prenatal Distress, and High-Risk Pregnancy.

Objectives: To examine the examined the effects of high risk pregnancy and prenatal distress on parental postnatal adaptation.

Methods: A sample of 111 expecting parents, consisting of 32 high risk pregnancy (HRP) mothers and 21 spouses and 36 matched low risk pregnancy (LRP) mothers and 22 spouses completed reports of depression symptoms (BDI) and pregnancy related concerns prenatally. At three months postpartum, parent-infant direct observations and reports of parenting alliance (PAI), stress (PSI-SF), satisfaction and efficacy (PSOC) were gathered.

Cognitive and developmental outcome of conservatively treated children with congenital hyperinsulinism.

Background: Congenital hyperinsulinism (CHI) is the most common cause of persistent hypoglycemia in infants. Its management can be extremely complicated, and may involve medical therapy and surgery. The mainstay of the treatment is to maintain normoglycemia, since hypoglycemia during infancy can have severe neurological consequences.

The expression and regulation of anger in toddlers: relations to maternal behavior and mental representations.

Anger is an intense and adaptive approach emotion that undergoes significant development during the toddler years. We assessed the expression of anger and the strategies toddlers use to regulate it in relation to maternal behavior and mental representations. Seventy-four toddlers were observed in three anger-eliciting paradigms: toy removal (TR), still-face (SF), and delayed gratification (DG).

Family functioning and interactive patterns in the context of infant psychopathology.

Family functioning and mother-infant relational patterns were examined in 38 clinic-referred infants and 34 matched non-referred infants. Referred infants were diagnosed with the Diagnostic Classification for Zero to Three. On the family level, referred families showed significantly lower family functioning in all domains of emotional and instrumental communication, regardless of the specific infant's diagnoses.

Maternal representations, infant psychiatric status, and mother-child relationship in clinic-referred and non-referred infants.

To examine the relations between maternal representations, infant socio-emotional difficulties, and mother-child relational behavior, 49 clinic-referred infants and their mothers were compared to 30 non-referred controls. Clinic-referred infants' psychiatric status was determined with the DC 0-3-R classification of Zeanah and Benoit (Child Adolesc Psychiatry Clin N Am 4:539-554, 1995) and controls were screened for socio-emotional difficulties. Mothers were interviewed with the parent development interview (Aber et al.

Sustained withdrawal behavior in clinic-referred and nonreferred infants.

To examine the relations between infants' sustained withdrawal behavior and children's mental health status and maternal and child relational behavior, 36 clinic-referred and 43 control infants were evaluated. Families were visited at home, mother-child free play and feeding interactions were videotaped, and mothers completed self-report measures. Interactions were coded for sustained withdrawal using the Alarm Distress Baby Scale (ADBB; Guedeney and Fermanian, 2001) and for global relational patterns with the Coding of Interactive Behavior (CIB; Feldman, 1998).