From infancy to eight: How early maternal mental health, emotion reminiscing, and language shape children's mental health.

To test the transmission of mental health difficulties from mother to child, we examined mediation through emotion reminiscing conversations and child language. Maternal depression symptoms were measured at 9 months post-partum, and child mental health outcomes were measured at age 8 years. Emotion reminiscing conversations between 1,234 mother-child pairs (624 boys, 610 girls) were recorded as part of a large, diverse, longitudinal cohort Growing Up in New Zealand. The 1,234 reminiscing conversations were transcribed and coded for maternal elaboration and emotion resolution quality (mother and child). The coded reminiscing variables did not mediate the pathway from maternal depression to child mental health outcomes; however, each maternal reminiscing variable together with child language skill serially mediated the relationship from maternal depression symptoms to child-reported anxiety and depression symptoms, and parent-reported child externalizing symptoms. Language as a skill and it's use as a tool for making shared meaning from past events are highlighted as possible mechanisms for the intergenerational transmission of mental health difficulties. These findings point to potential opportunities for early interventions, including prevention of and support for postnatal depression, family intervention in reminiscing training, and supporting child language development.

Maternal depressive symptoms and child language development: Exploring potential pathways through observed and self-reported mother-child verbal interactions.

Maternal depressive symptoms (MDS) in the postnatal period may impact children's later development through poorer quality parent-child interactions. The current study tested a specific pathway from MDS (child age 9 months) to child receptive vocabulary (4 ½ years) through both self-reported and observed parent-child verbal interactions (at both 2 and 4 ½ years). Participants (n = 4,432) were part of a large, diverse, contemporary pre-birth national cohort study: Growing Up in New Zealand. Results indicated a direct association between greater MDS at 9 months and poorer receptive vocabulary at age 4 ½ years. There was support for an indirect pathway through self-reported parent-child verbal interactions at 2 years and through observed parent-child verbal interactions at 4 ½ years. A moderated mediation effect was also found: the indirect effect of MDS on child vocabulary through observed verbal interaction was supported for families living in areas of greater socioeconomic deprivation. Overall, findings support the potential role of parent-child verbal interactions as a mechanism for the influence of MDS on later child language development. This pathway may be particularly important for families experiencing socioeconomic adversity, suggesting that effective and appropriate supportive parenting interventions be preferentially targeted to reduce inequities in child language outcomes.

Growing Memories: Coaching mothers in elaborative reminiscing with toddlers benefits adolescents' turning-point narratives and wellbeing.

INTRODUCTION: Parental elaborative reminiscing supports young children's autobiographical memory, narrative, and socioemotional skills. OBJECTIVE: This study is an adolescent follow-up of a reminiscing intervention in which 115 primary-caregiver mothers of toddlers were randomly assigned to a control group (n = 59) or to receive training in elaborative reminiscing (n = 56) for the next year. METHOD: At age 15, 93 of the now-adolescents (81%) were invited to narrate a turning point in their lives and to report on their personality traits and well-being. Turning-point narratives were coded for causal coherence (connections between past events and present self) and thematic coherence (elaboration and resolutions). RESULTS: Adolescents whose mothers were in the intervention group told more causally coherent turning-point narratives and reported fewer emotional problems than control participants, covarying for baseline measures and personality traits. CONCLUSION: Maternal elaborative reminiscing in early childhood appears to have long-term benefits for adolescents' causal coherence in turning-point narratives and well-being.

Coaching in maternal reminiscing with preschoolers leads to elaborative and coherent personal narratives in early adolescence.

This long-term follow-up of an early childhood training study (Growing Memories) to promote elaborative reminiscing tested continued effects on mother-child reminiscing and on adolescents' narrative coherence. Of the original 115 families, 100 participated when their children were 3.5 years of age and 76 participated when their children were young adolescents (Mage = 11.2 years). Mothers and children reminisced about a positive event and a negative event at each timepoint, and adolescents narrated high points and low points. Mothers and children who had participated in the reminiscing intervention in early childhood remained more elaborative in dyadic reminiscing over time. Moreover, adolescents whose mothers had participated in elaborative reminiscing training in early childhood told more coherent low-point narratives (with respect to context and theme) than adolescents of mothers in the control group. These long-term benefits for the quality of mother-adolescent reminiscing and adolescents' narrative coherence have implications for theories of narrative identity development and for designing interventions in early childhood to foster autobiographical memory, which may help later understanding of difficult life events.

How three generations narrate their vicarious family stories: intrafamilial similarities, gender and cross-generational differences.

This study investigated the memory characteristics of vicarious family stories. Seventy-two families including three generations of women and men from different samples of families were recruited. Results can be described in three main sections: (a) intrafamilial similarities; (b) gender differences; and (c) cross-generational differences. For intrafamilial similarities, members of the same family showed similarities in terms of the volume and number of other-related words. For gender differences, women focused more on social interactions, used more other-related words and subjective perspective terms, and made more identity connections between others and parents than men. When describing parents' reasons for telling family stories, women were also less likely to report development and teaching reasons and more likely to report emotional reasons compared to men. For cross-generational differences, the oldest generation's stories were less coherent than the youngest and middle generations', and less voluminous than the middle generation's. Additionally, the youngest generation reported entertainment reasons more often than the oldest generation. Emotional reasons were more common for the middle generation than for the youngest and oldest generations. These findings contribute to the growing area of research on family narratives by examining the elements of narrative identity in family stories across three generations.

Narrative coherence, psychopathology, and wellbeing: Concurrent and longitudinal findings in a mid-adolescent sample.

INTRODUCTION: Research with adults and older adolescents has found that people exhibiting higher narrative coherence in life stories also report higher psychological wellbeing; however, this link has not been investigated longitudinally. The current study investigated concurrent and longitudinal relationships in mid-adolescence between narrative coherence (causal and thematic coherence) of turning point narratives and psychopathology (depressive symptoms and rumination) and psychological wellbeing (life satisfaction). Hypothesis one was that in concurrent analyses, narrative coherence would be negatively associated with psychopathology and positively associated with wellbeing. Hypothesis two was that higher narrative coherence would predict lower psychopathology and greater wellbeing over time. METHOD: A sample of 132 adolescents (ages 14-18 years) wrote a narrative about a turning point event in their life and completed psychopathology and psychological wellbeing measures twice, approximately one year apart. RESULTS: Partial correlations on concurrent data showed that only causal coherence was associated with lower psychopathology and higher wellbeing. Longitudinal regressions showed that causal coherence predicted higher wellbeing one year later. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that causal coherence in life stories may play a causal role in increased life satisfaction over time for adolescents. Experimental research is required to further investigate this possibility.

Origins of mother-child reminiscing style.

Maternal elaborative reminiscing supports preschool children's autobiographical memory, self-concept, and emotion understanding. What are the factors contributing to mothers' elaborative style of reminiscing? In a longitudinal community sample (n = 170 at the final data point), this study explored the role of maternal depression (8-44 months), maternal sensitivity and maternal mind-mindedness (8 months), as well as child factors of joint attention (15 months), attachment security (15 months), and language (26 months) for mother-child reminiscing about a positive (happy) and a negative (scared) event at 44 months. Mothers could be classed into two groups of low versus increasing depression from 8 to 44 months, yet maternal depression did not uniquely predict mother-child reminiscing after accounting for maternal sensitivity and other factors. Instead, maternal sensitivity, children's joint attention, and language uniquely predicted children's elaborations about the scared event at 44 months, and maternal sensitivity uniquely predicted mothers' elaborations about the scared event at 44 months. Mothers who are more sensitive in early interactions may later be better at engaging their children when reminiscing about negative emotions. These findings have implications for the design of interventions targeted at supporting mothers to engage in elaborative reminiscing with their preschool children.

Origins of adolescents' earliest memories.

This prospective longitudinal study traced changes and individual differences in childhood amnesia over adolescence. A sample of 58 adolescents were followed from age 1-1/2 to age 16 years across 8 timepoints. At ages 12 (n = 46) and 16 (n = 51), adolescents completed an early memory interview. Early childhood measures included children's self-awareness, attachment security, nonverbal memory, verbal memory, language, theory of mind, narrative, and the early reminiscing environment (mothers' elaborative reminiscing). Adolescents continued to forget their earliest memories over adolescence, such that the age of first memory increased from 40 to 52 months from ages 12 to 16. The sole unique contributor to individual differences in age of earliest memory at both 12 and 16 years was mothers' elaborative reminiscing, with adolescents recalling earlier memories if their mothers had reminisced more elaboratively with them during early childhood. At age 16, the role of maternal reminiscing was moderated by self-awareness at age 1-1/2. Mothers' elaborative reminiscing mattered for the age of adolescents' earliest memories only for children who showed lower levels of self-awareness as toddlers. This pattern suggests a buffering effect for the role of maternal reminiscing in children's earliest memories, and supports integrated theories of childhood amnesia.

Narrative self and high risk for schizophrenia: remembering the past and imagining the future.

We examined the narrative self of those at high psychometric risk for schizophrenia (HR). Eighty undergraduate students wrote personal narratives about a turning-point event in their life, and about a possible future. The turning-point narratives were coded for topic, specificity, event valence, valence of causal coherence link, overall level of causal coherence, and agency. The future narratives were coded for the number and valence of goals, topic of goals, and specificity of goals. Word count was applied to all narratives. The HR group expressed lower levels of agency and a trend of lower levels of causal coherence when narrating turning-point events. When imagining their futures, HR participants produced shorter narratives and showed a trend of having fewer goals. Including the dimensions of both the turning point and the future narratives revealed that the HR group membership was best predicted by lower levels of agency and of causal coherence in the turning-point narrative, and fewer words in the future narrative. Narratives differed specifically in those few elements that are critical for the achievement of narrative continuity. Consistent with the theory, people at high risk for schizophrenia already present, to some extent, an impoverishment in their narrative sense of self.

ATTACHMENT AND MEMORY RESEARCH: REFLECTING ON A SHARED PAST AND A COLLABORATIVE FUTURE.

This commentary applauds the authors of the monograph, The Mother-Child Attachment Partnership in Early Childhood: Secure Base Behavioral and Representational Processes, for their thorough and elegant exploration of the development of attachment working models in the preschool years in relation to maternal sensitivity and attachment representations, mother-child co-constructions of attachment-relevant stories, and children's own secure base behavior. These findings are set against a backdrop of children's memory development, with the recommendation that future research delves even younger to explore the development of attachment working models in children under 3 years. A second recommendation is to continue the work with older children, with a particular focus on the conversations they are having with caregivers about actual attachment-related experiences. This new research poses challenges, especially with at-risk samples. Fortunately, the stage is now set for attachment and memory researchers to come together to continue to map the development of attachment working models.

Te Reo Maori: indigenous language acquisition in the context of New Zealand English.

This study assessed the status of te reo Maori, the indigenous language of New Zealand, in the context of New Zealand English. From a broadly representative sample of 6327 two-year-olds (Growing Up in New Zealand), 6090 mothers (96%) reported their children understood English, and 763 mothers (12%) reported their children understood Maori. Parents completed the new MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory short forms for te reo Maori (NZM: CDI sf) and New Zealand English (NZE: CDI sf). Mothers with higher education levels had children with larger vocabularies in both te reo Maori and NZ English. For English speakers, vocabulary advantages also existed for girls, first-borns, monolinguals, those living in areas of lower deprivation, and those whose mothers had no concerns about their speech and language. Because more than 99% of Maori speakers were bilingual, te reo Maori acquisition appears to be occurring in the context of the acquisition of New Zealand English.

Telling the Tale and Living Well: Adolescent Narrative Identity, Personality Traits, and Well-Being Across Cultures.

This study explored links between narrative identity, personality traits, and well-being for 263 adolescents (age 12-21) from three New Zealand cultures: Maori, Chinese, and European. Turning-point narratives were assessed for autobiographical reasoning (causal coherence), local thematic coherence, emotional expressivity, and topic. Across cultures, older adolescents with higher causal coherence reported better well-being. Younger adolescents with higher causal coherence instead reported poorer well-being. Personal development topics were positively linked to well-being for New Zealand European adolescents only, and thematic coherence was positively linked to well-being for Maori adolescents only. Negative expressivity, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness were also linked to well-being. Implications of these cultural similarities and differences are considered for theories of narrative identity, personality, and adolescent well-being.

Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised Very Short Form: A New Factor Structure's Associations With Parenting Perceptions and Child Language Outcomes.

The Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised-Very Short Form (IBQ-R VSF; Putnam, Helbig, Gartstein, Rothbart, & Leerkes, 2014 ) is a new publicly available measure of infant temperament measuring positive affectivity/surgency (PAS), negative emotionality (NEG), and orienting and regulatory capacity (ORC). Although the initial psychometric properties of the 3-factor model appear promising, it has not been administered to a large and diverse sample and its predictive validity has not been established. This study administered the IBQ-R VSF to a diverse sample of 5,639 mothers of infants aged between 23 and 52 weeks. Confirmatory factor analysis found that the 3-factor solution did not meet the requirement for satisfactory model fit. Exploratory factor analysis found that a 5-factor solution (PAS, NEG, Orienting Capacity, Affiliation/Regulation, and Fear) was statistically and conceptually the most parsimonious. All 5 temperament dimensions were found to relate to both mother- and partner-reported infant closeness, parenting confidence, and parenting satisfaction, and four of the dimensions (PAS, Orienting Capacity, NEG, and Fear) related to the infants' communication development. Some parental differences were also found. Together these findings suggest that the 5-factor IBQ-R VSF is a promising measure of infant temperament and is related to parenting perceptions and child language development.

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Very Short Form: An Item Response Theory Analysis of Infant Temperament in New Zealand.

The Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised Very Short Form (IBQ-R VSF; Putnam, Helbig, Gartstein, Rothbart, & Leerkes, 2014 ) is a newly published measure of infant temperament with a 3-factor structure. Recently Peterson et al. ( 2017 ) suggested that a 5-factor structure (Positive Affectivity/Surgency, Negative Emotionality, Orienting Capacity, Affiliation/Regulation, and Fear) was more parsimonious and showed promising reliability and predictive validity in a large, diverse sample. However, little is known about the 5-factor model's precision across the temperament dimensions range and whether it discriminates equally well across ethnicities. A total of 5,567 mothers responded to the IBQ-R VSF in relation to their infants (N = 5,639) between 23 and 52 weeks old. Using item response theory, we conducted a series of 2 parameter logistic item response models and found that 5 IBQ-R VSF temperament dimensions showed a good distribution of estimates across each latent trait range and these estimates centered close to the population mean. The IBQ-R VSF was also similarly precise across 4 ethnic groups (European, Maori, Pacific peoples, and Asians), suggesting that it can be used as comparable measure for infant temperament in a diversity of ethnic groups.

Let's korero (talk): the practice and functions of reminiscing among mothers and children in Maori families.

Maori adults recall earlier memories than New Zealand European or Chinese adults, highlighting the importance of memory in Maori culture. In this study, Maori preschool children and their mothers (N = 41) reminisced about a diverse range of past events, including everyday events, the child's birth, cultural rituals and the child's misbehaviour. Mothers also reported how frequently they discussed past events with their children, as well as their level of affiliation with Maori culture. Mothers who reported higher levels of cultural affiliation also reported reminiscing more frequently about a diverse range of past events. Mothers reminisced in more elaborative ways about everyday events with their children compared to birth stories, cultural rituals and misbehaviours. Maternal reminiscing about cultural rituals and misbehaviours, however, along with maternal reminiscing about everyday events and birth stories, were significantly correlated with children's memory across conversations. These results underscore the continued importance of reminiscing about culturally relevant events in Maori culture, and the newfound importance for Maori families of reminiscing about everyday events.

Early memories in young adults from separated and non-separated families.

Two studies investigated the earliest memories of New Zealand European young adults (N = 80, Study 1 and N = 120, Study 2) from separated and non-separated families. Participants' earliest memories were assessed for age, for density (how far apart the memories were, Study 2) and for narrative coherence of the memories. Questionnaires were designed to investigate the role of changes in family structure, for example, in the number of adults in the participants' households and the timing of the parental separation. Study 2 further investigated stress and painful divorce-related feelings as additional variables in adjustment after divorce. No overall differences in age of earliest memory emerged between young adults from separated and non-separated parents. Within the group from separated parents, however, memories were earlier when parents separated early in the child's life (

Narratives and traits in personality development among New Zealand Maori, Chinese, and European adolescents.

Narrative and trait levels of personality were assessed in a sample of 268 adolescents from age 12 to 21 from New Zealand Maori, Chinese, and European cultures. Adolescents narrated three critical events and completed a Big Five personality inventory. Each narrative was coded for causal and thematic coherence. NZ Chinese adolescents reported lower levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, and higher levels of neuroticism, than NZ Maori or European adolescents. Cultural differences were also evident in narrative coherence. Adolescents in all three groups demonstrated age-related increases in thematic coherence, but only NZ European adolescents demonstrated the expected age-related increases in causal coherence. Narrative identity and traits were distinct aspects of personality for younger adolescents, but were linked for middle and older adolescents. These findings support the importance of both narrative identity and traits in understanding personality development in adolescents across cultures.

How mothers talk to their children about failure, mistakes and setbacks is related to their children's fear of failure.

BACKGROUND: Many people fear failure and making mistakes. This fear can be transmitted from parents to children, suggesting that parental communication regarding failures and setbacks may play a critical role in shaping a child's perception of mistakes. AIMS: In this study, we investigated how everyday parent-child conversations about setbacks influence children's fear of making mistakes. SAMPLE: Drawing on the large pre-birth Growing Up in New Zealand cohort, we focused on a sub-sample of 231 mother-child dyads who engaged in a recorded conversations about a "recent disappointment or setback" when the children were 8 years old. METHOD: Conversations between mothers and children about the recent disappointments were coded to identify whether parents recognised or acknowledge their child's emotional response, if action plans were discussed, and the types of resources that the child could draw on. The children also completed a questionnaire about their global self-worth and their fear of making mistakes. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The discussion of clear action plans, in the absence of a discussion about collaborative resources, was found to be associated with an increased fear of making mistakes among children. Conversely, when mothers clearly acknowledged their child's emotions and discussed ways to work collaboratively with their child on future problems, there was a notable decrease in the child's fear of mistakes. However, it is noteworthy that many mothers in our study either minimally acknowledged or dismissed their child's emotions(40%), rarely discussed action plans (55%), or collaborative resources (79%)when discussing the recent setback.

Resting EEG correlates of neurodevelopment in a socioeconomically and linguistically diverse sample of toddlers: Wave 1 of the Kia Timata Pai best start New Zealand study.

Development of communication and self-regulation skills is fundamental to psychosocial maturation in childhood. The Kia Timata Pai Best Start (KTP) longitudinal study aims to promote these skills through interventions delivered at early childcare centers across New Zealand. In addition to evaluating effects of the interventions on behavioral and cognitive outcomes, the study utilizes electroencephalography (EEG) to characterize cortical development in a subsample of participating children. Here, we present results of the baseline resting EEG assessment with 193 children aged 15 to 33 months. We identified EEG correlates of individual differences in demographics, communication abilities, and temperament. We obtained communication and behavior ratings from multiple informants, and we applied contemporary analytic methods to the EEG data. Periodic spectral power adjusted for aperiodic activity was most closely associated with demographic, language, and behavioral measures. As in previous studies, gamma power was positively associated with verbal language. Alpha power was positively associated with effortful control. Nonverbal and verbal language measures showed distinct associations with EEG indices, as did the three temperament domains. Our results identified a number of candidate EEG measurements for use as longitudinal markers of optimal cortical development and response to interventions in the KTP cohort.

Maternal reminiscing during middle childhood: Associations with maternal personality and child temperament from the Growing Up in New Zealand cohort study.

The way that mothers talk about the past (reminisce) with young children is linked to key memory, language, and socioemotional outcomes. The present research explored the role of a range of child, maternal, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that predict maternal reminiscing style, with a particular focus on maternal personality and child temperament. A total of 1,404 mother-child dyads from the prebirth longitudinal cohort study Growing Up in New Zealand (https://www.growingup.co.nz) participated in a reminiscing task about a negative event when children were 8 years old. This broader cohort is broadly representative of the New Zealand population in terms of maternal ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Conversations were scored using a revised version of the Elaborative Reminiscing Scale. Child temperament during infancy, but not childhood, uniquely predicted maternal reminiscing style. Maternal extraversion also predicted a more elaborative reminiscing style. Other maternal factors, including education, ethnicity, and age, were also identified as unique predictors of maternal reminiscing style. These findings fit well with an ecological systems view of maternal reminiscing as a function of child, maternal, and cultural factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).