Effects of parental separation and divorce on very young children.

Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care were analyzed to explore effects of marital separation on children in the first 3 years of life. The sample included 73 never-married mothers and 97 separated mothers; a comparison group of 170 was conditionally randomly selected from the 2-parent families. Children in 2-parent families performed better than children in 1-parent families on assessments of cognitive and social abilities, problem behavior, attachment security, and behavior with mother. However, controlling for mothers' education and family income reduced these differences, and associations with separated-intact marital status were nonsignificant (the effect size was .01). Thus, children's psychological development was not affected by parental separation per se; it was related to mothers' income, education, ethnicity, child-rearing beliefs, depressive symptoms, and behavior.

Intergenerational influences on the parent-infant relationship in the transition to parenthood.

PIP: In this study, questions were addressed concerning the intergenerational transmission of parent-child relationships in couples going through the transition to parenthood. During the 2nd trimester of their 1st pregnancy, 38 couples provided information concerning experiences of parenting in their family of origin, then were reinterviewed and observed interacting with their infants at 3 months postpartum. It was expected that when these young adults had reported prenatally better parenting by their parents on specific parenting variables, they in turn would experience early parenthood more adaptively and would show better parenting with their own infants. The analyses suggest that women's reports in interviews of their delight in their child, their investment in their child, their sensitivity to the child's needs, and their acceptance of the child--construed as a factor to represent quality of adaptation to parenting--were significantly predicted by their perception of their own mother's intrusiveness, the support they received from their fathers during adolescence, the sensitivity of their fathers, and, lastly, the subject mother's level of psychological health. Although individual psychological health added some prediction of maternal adaptation to parenting over and above that provided by the family of origin variables, neither psychological health nor marital competence seemed to mediate the relationship between family of origin variables and mother's adaptation to parenthood. For men, adaptation to parenthood was predicted powerfully by the perception of their father's intrusiveness and further predicted by the quality of their current marriage. Thus the quality of their marriage added to but did not replace the predictiveness of the family of origin variable.^ieng

The impact of parental trait anxiety on the utilization of health care services in infancy: a prospective study.

Used a prospective approach to examine the relation of prenatal parental anxiety to pediatric utilization in the first year. 31 firstborn children and their parents participated in the study. These families were primarily Caucasian, college-educated, middle-class couples who had been married an average of 4.3 years at the prenatal time period. They were first seen in their home during the second trimester of pregnancy. At that time, each parent independently completed the Life Events Survey and the Speilberger Trait Anxiety Inventory. At 12 months, each parent completed the Marital Relationship Inventory. Data on pediatric services utilization were derived from complete medical records when the child reached 12 months of age. Frequency counts for unscheduled acute care and well baby care visits were used as the primary dependent variables. As expected, prenatal reports of high maternal anxiety predicted an increased incidence of unscheduled acute care visits in the infancy period. The findings implicate physiological mechanisms and extend earlier work on psychosocial influences of pediatric services utilization to the infancy period, a time when children experience their greatest incidence of illness and patterns of medical care use become established.

Stability and change in family-of-origin recollections over the first four years of parenthood.

This article, one of several from a longitudinal family study, examines stability and change in family-of-origin recollections. Family-of-origin data were collected by means of a questionnaire from both husbands and wives prior to the birth of their first child and 41/2 years later. The questionnaire probed the subjects' recollections of their relationships with their mothers and fathers and of their parents' marital relationships. With median correlations for the women and men of .70 and .72, family-of-origin recollections appear relatively stable over this 41/2-year period. One exception to the relative stability was that women recalled their fathers and the closeness of their parent's marriage less positively after 4 years of parenthood. These changes in women's recollections were related to contemporaneous experiences with husbands' depression and qualities of the husband's parenting.

Maternal employment in a family context: effects on infant-mother and infant-father attachments.

The relation between resumption of full-time employment by mothers of infants under 6 months of age, and subsequent infant-mother and infant-father attachments, was examined in this study. Attachment classifications and ratings of reunion behavior with mother and with father in Ainsworth's Strange Situation at 12 months were obtained for 57 nonemployed-mother families and 40 employed-mother families. No relation emerged between maternal work status and the quality of infants' attachments to their mothers, indicating that early resumption of employment may not impede the development of secure infant-mother attachment. A significantly higher proportion of insecure attachments to fathers in employed-mother families was found for sons but not for daughters. Joint examination of the infants' attachments to both parents revealed a trend suggesting that in employed-mother families, boys were more likely to be insecurely attached to both parents than were girls in employed-mother families or infants of either sex in nonemployed-mother families. These patterns are discussed in light of differences in maternal and paternal sex-typing behavior and of evidence suggesting boys' vulnerability to psychosocial stress.

The transition to parenthood: III. Incorporation of the child into the family.

The major focus of this article is the relationship of the parents' marital relationship structure to the incorporation of the child into the family. Our central hypothesis is that couples who have evolved more competent marital structures prenatally are more likely to incorporate the child successfully into the family.

The relation between maternal employment status and the stability of attachments to mother and to father.

Recent investigations of the relation between maternal employment and the stability of infant attachments have implied that maternal employment introduces a stressful, unpredictable element into family life. To assess the effect of maternal employment per se, stable and changing maternal employment status were distinguished in this study. Classifications of the quality of infant-mother and of infant-father attachments were made for 59 children at 12 and 20 months of age using the Ainsworth strange situation paradigm. The stability of attachments from 12 to 20 months was examined in 4 groups defined by maternal employment status. 3 of these groups (nonemployed, part-time employed, full-time employed) were characterized by no change in maternal employment status from several months prior to the first assessment of attachment through the 20-month assessment; the fourth group was characterized by maternal employment status that changed between the 2 assessments of attachment. Among the stable conditions of maternal employment status there was no indication of differences in the stability of attachment to either parent whether the mother was employed or not, indicating that maternal employment can lend as much stability to family relationships as the condition of maternal nonemployment. No changes in the quality of attachment to mother and relatively frequent changes in attachment to father (46%) were present when mother changed employment status. The basis for this difference is discussed in terms of maternal versus paternal response to alterations in life-style initiated by mother's employment changes.

Marriage, adult adjustment, and early parenting.

The impact of parents' marriages, measured prenatally, on their parenting of firstborn, 3-month-old infants was assessed. Though the association between marriage and parenting was the focus, adult psychological adjustment was measured also to rule out the alternative hypothesis that psychological adjustment relates to both marital quality and parenting quality and accounts for any association between them. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses in which parental adjustment was entered first as a covariate were used to test the relation between close/confiding marriages and parenting of 3-month-old infants. From the findings, it was concluded that even when differences in individual psychological adjustment are taken into account, mothers are warmer and more sensitive with their infants and fathers hold more positive attitudes toward their infants and their roles as parents when they are in close/confiding marriages. It is asserted that qualities of marriage play an important part in the development of parent-child relationships.