The role of experience in parenting beliefs of British and Italian women during pregnancy.

To understand the role of experience in parenting beliefs about caring for infants, we examined the parenting beliefs of pregnant women who were expecting their first child with those of pregnant women who already had at least one other child. A culturally diverse sample of 550 British and Italian women completed self-report measures evaluating their beliefs about the value of attunement and structure in caregiving, parenting self-efficacy, and home chaos. Psychometric evaluation confirmed the two-factor structure of the Baby Care Questionnaire (BCQ) for measuring attunement and structure but did not support configural invariance across the different samples.