Does parental autonomy support mediate the relation between parent and infant executive function? A study of mothers and fathers in the Netherlands and China.

Parenting skills, such as Autonomy Support (AS), have been proposed as a potential mechanism explaining the intergenerational contiguity of Executive Function (EF). However, few studies have focused on mothers and fathers among non-Western families. The current study investigated the role of maternal and paternal AS in the relation between parental EF and infant EF at 14 months of age among 123 Dutch and 63 Chinese first-time mothers and fathers and their infants.

Narrative coherence across the transition to parenthood: Primiparous parents' representations of their child in relation to parental sensitivity.

Narrative coherence reflects parents' ability to provide a believable, clear, relevant, and internally consistent story about their child. Parents demonstrating more narrative coherence have been theorized to show higher parental sensitivity, but this has not been examined in a normative sample, nor across the transition to parenthood, and only once in fathers. The aim of this study was to examine stability and change in narrative coherence across the transition to parenthood in mothers and fathers, as well as the relation between pre- and postnatal narrative coherence and postnatal parental sensitivity.

The role of infant attention and parental sensitivity in infant cognitive development in the Netherlands and China.

Infant attention and parental sensitivity are important predictors of later child executive function (EF). However, most studies have investigated infant and parent factors in relation to child EF separately and included only mothers from Western samples. The current study examined whether both infant attention at 4 months and parental sensitivity at 4 and 14 months were related to infant EF (i.

Attitudes about child maltreatment in China and the Netherlands.

Background: Definitions of child maltreatment vary between studies, and few are informed by research in non-Western countries.

Objective: We examined attitudes about child maltreatment in China and the Netherlands.

Participants And Setting: The sample consisted of 304 participants from three groups (mothers, fathers, and teachers) and two countries (China and the Netherlands).

Video observations of maternal sensitivity in urban and Rural Iran: an exploratory study.

Aiming to contribute to the cross-cultural understanding of the nature and meaning of the sensitivity construct, this exploratory study observed 26 mothers and their 18-60-month-old children in rural (15) and urban Iran (11) for 30 minutes of free interaction in the home context. This first study to use video observations of parenting in Iran showed that mothers were generally comfortable with being filmed, intercoder reliability could be established for the Ainsworth sensitivity scale, and the full range of sensitivity scores was observed. Qualitative descriptions of representative interactions are provided to illustrate stylistic differences between rural and urban mothers.