Couple Relationship Status and Patterns in Early Parenting Practices

Objective: To explore the association between maternal depression and the screen and reading time experienced by their infants. Methods: This study utilises data on 158 women and infants, collected within the Mercy Pregnancy and Emotional Wellbeing Study. Women less than 20 weeks gestation were diagnosed using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders. Six months postpartum they completed questionnaires about themselves, their infant and early parenting practices. Results: Children of women with a past diagnosis of depression were exposed to fewer days of 15-minute reading time per week compared to the children of women with no diagnosis. While the current depression group showed a lower average reading time, this difference was not statistically significant. There were no significant differences in infant screen time between groups. Conclusions: A maternal past diagnosis of depression is correlated with decreased reading time in infants. This may present a practical point for screening and intervention or suggest a causal pathway for poorer outcomes in children of those with depression.

Download Full-text

Marital Functioning and Parenting in Extended Family Living Arrangements: A Qualitative Study in Family Buildings

10.31234/osf.io/gpvqr ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Merve Adli Isleyen

Keyword(s):

Living Arrangements ◽

Parenting Practices ◽

Extended Family ◽

Married Couples ◽

Couple Relationship ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Marital Functioning ◽

The Family ◽

Family Building ◽

And Gender

In this study, relational and parenting experiences of living in a family building (FB) is interrogated through the experiences of couples. Seven married couples who had at least one child and have been living in family buildings at least for a year were selected for the present study. The participants’ mean age was 41, ranging from 30-46, and their average marriage length was 19, varying between 9 and 34. The semi-structured interviews, which took approximately an hour, were held at the participants’ apartments and conducted individually with partners. The participants expressed their living experiences in the family building, its effect on their general life, couple relationship, parenting practices and their boundary negotiations. Thematic analysis was carried out and the analysis of the interviews revealed four main themes: FB as a Network of Support and Safety, Roles and Rules of Conduct in the FB, Interference in the FB and Boundary Negotiations in the FB. The overall results of this study demonstrated that the participants’ experiences were shaped by the structure of the family building and gender, and that the participants exerted and manifested their agency according to the characteristics and the context of the FB. The results provided useful information for clinicians who work with clients, living in FBs or interdependent families. The findings are discussed in the context of the existing literature, and limitations and suggestions for further studies are presented.

Download Full-text

Maternal fatigue and depression: Identifying vulnerability and relationship to early parenting practices

Advances in Mental Health ◽

10.5172/jamh.2012.10.3.277 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 277-291 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Catherine Wade ◽

Rebecca Giallo ◽

Amanda Cooklin

Keyword(s):

Parenting Practices ◽

Early Parenting ◽

Maternal Fatigue

Download Full-text

Parenting ideologies, infant feeding and popular culture

Social Experiences of Breastfeeding ◽

10.1332/policypress/9781447338499.003.0011 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 147-162

Author(s):

Abigail Locke

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Infant Feeding ◽

Parenting Practices ◽

Psychological Perspective ◽

Early Parenting ◽

Key Points ◽

The Social ◽

Feeding Methods ◽

Promotion Strategies ◽

The Impact

This chapter takes a critical social and health psychological perspective to bring together different strands of the contemporary debate around infant feeding, drawing on ideas across the social and health sciences to explore key points of tension. These include media representation of infant feeding, health promotion discourse in a ‘neoliberal’ society, and the impact of contemporary parenting ideologies on parenting practices and parenting subjectivities. It argues that some of the complexities and nuances of the infant feeding debates may be one way of explaining discrepancies in rates and the difficulties inherent in breastfeeding promotion strategies. Some of this stems from the ways in which it is approached — as a topic in its own right or as part of a larger jigsaw of early parenting. The former approach runs the risk of ignoring wider issues that are impacting on infant feeding; the latter runs the risk of downplaying infant feeding methods. The chapter aims to reach a deeper understanding of the ways that competing discourses about what it means to be a ‘good parent’, and how we feed our infants, become operationalised in these different standpoints, using contemporary examples to illustrate these points of tension.

Download Full-text

Understanding the impacts of video-guided activities on parent-child interaction

10.31234/osf.io/dmeza ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

George Kachergis ◽

Emily Hembacher ◽

Veronica Cristiano ◽

Vivian Zhang ◽

Michael C. Frank

Keyword(s):

Language Learning ◽

Parenting Practices ◽

Parent Engagement ◽

Low Cost ◽

Early Parenting ◽

Very Young Children ◽

Age Appropriate ◽

Video Experiment ◽

Future Outcomes ◽

Parent Child

Early parenting practices play an important role in shaping children’s future outcomes. In particular, high-quality early interactions can facilitate language learning and school performance. The rise of phone-based parenting applications (“apps”) could deliver low-cost interventions on parenting style to a wide variety of populations, especially the parents of very young children, who are often difficult to reach in other ways. Yet little is known about the effects of communicating to parents through app-based interventions. In two studies (one preregistered), we showed parents short videos depicting age-appropriate parent-child activities from a parenting app. We found that after watching the video, parents spoke more and made more bids for joint attention, as compared with controls who watched no video (experiment 1) or a science video (experiment 2). These results suggest that activity videos can lead to positive changes in parent engagement, providing support for the use of such videos in parenting interventions.

Download Full-text