Families Facing Pandemic Modifications of Everyday Life: A Mixed Study on Mothers' and Children's Emotional Reactions and Regulation Strategies.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many enduring changes in the everyday life of families, with negative effects on parents' and children's wellbeing. However, there is a lack of studies in the literature exploring the emotional reactions and coping strategies of both mothers and children of different ages. Furthermore, most studies used only self-reports. This study aimed to identify the emotions and coping strategies of children, adolescents and their mothers and to verify the association between maternal and child wellbeing. A mixed-method design using interviews and questionnaires was applied to collect information on wellbeing (emotional reactions, behavioral/emotional problems) and coping strategies of both mothers (n = 65; M age = 42.17; SD = 4.40; M age = 41.63; SD = 4.48), and their children (n = 35, 8-10 year; n = 30, 11-13 year) during the second wave of the pandemic (December 2020). No differences between the groups emerged concerning the emotional reactions reported. In contrast, mothers and children of different ages reported different self-regulation and other-regulation strategies. Moreover, maternal strategies had different effects on children's wellbeing. The integration of qualitative and quantitative results was informative to understand how families adapted to the radical changes of everyday life related to the pandemic. The implications for developing interventions in such similar stressful situations to promote family wellbeing are discussed.

The interplay between parenting and environmental sensitivity in the prediction of children's externalizing and internalizing behaviors during COVID-19.

The interplay of parenting and environmental sensitivity on children's behavioral adjustment during, and immediately after, the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions was investigated in two longitudinal studies involving Italian preschoolers (Study 1, N = 72; 43% girls, Myears = 3.82(1.38)) and primary school children (Study 2, N = 94; 55% girls, Myears = 9.08(0.56)). Data were collected before and during the first-wave lockdown (Studies 1 and 2) and one month later (Study 1). Parental stress and parent-child closeness were measured. Markers of environmental sensitivity in children were temperamental fearfulness and Sensory Processing Sensitivity. Results showed little change in externalizing and internalizing behaviors over time, but differences emerged when considering parenting and children's environmental sensitivity. In preschoolers, greater parenting stress was related to a stronger increase in internalizing and externalizing behaviors, with children high in fearful temperament showing a more marked decrease in externalizing behaviors when parenting stress was low. In school-aged children, parent-child closeness emerged as a protective factor for internalizing and externalizing behaviors during COVID-19, with children high in Sensory Processing Sensitivity showing a marked decrease in internalizing behaviors when closeness was high. Implications for developmental theory and practice in times of pandemic are discussed.

Mother-infant co-regulation during infancy: Developmental changes and influencing factors.

Dyadic interaction is the ecological niche in which early human development occurs and parent-infant co-regulation - the reciprocal adjustment between partners when interacting - is key for the dyadic functioning. Research showed that co-regulation changes with the advancing age; however how this development unfolds and by which variables would be affected is largely ignored. The present study investigated co-regulation longitudinal progression across seven-time points (4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 21 and 24 months of infants' age) while exploring the moderating effects of three infant variables (object manipulation, alternated gaze and shared meanings). The sample included healthy mother-infant dyads (N = 79) interacting for 5' in a context including objects. The interaction was coded by using the Fogel's Relational Coding System that distinguishes three main co-regulation patterns, i.e., unilateral, asymmetrical and symmetrical. Object manipulation, alternated gaze and shared meanings were also observed in the first, middle and final parts of the observational period, respectively. We used multilevel modeling technique to identify the developmental trajectories of each co-regulation pattern; we also analyzed whether the trends were moderated by specific factors at specific time periods. Results were statistically significant in both cases. We found an acceleration effect of the age on all the three co-regulation patterns. To specify, asymmetrical pattern decreased very soon, unilateral increased sharply from 6 to 9 months and then declined, symmetrical increased in the 12-15 months period and jumping up at the end. We also found a moderating effect of all the three infant's variables: infants who were higher in object manipulation increased unilateral pattern earlier and more than lower infants; infants who were higher in alternating the gaze between mother and object and in sharing meanings showed a higher and steeper trend of symmetrical pattern. This study is the first shaping co-regulation changes in their form and rate, so reliably accounting for the developmental nature of this process. It also showed that co-regulation changes related to different age dependent skills, thus contributing to define this process as a complex phenomenon.

Infant-Directed Speech From a Multidimensional Perspective: The Interplay of Infant Birth Status, Maternal Parenting Stress, and Dyadic Co-regulation on Infant-Directed Speech Linguistic and Pragmatic Features.

Infant-directed speech (IDS), the particular form of spontaneous language observed in interactions between parents and their infants, is a crucial aspect of the mother-infant interaction and an index of the attunement of maternal linguistic input to her infant communicative abilities and needs during dyadic interactions. The present study aimed to explore linguistic and pragmatic features of IDS during mother-infant interactions at 3-month of infant age. The effects of infant (birth status: preterm vs. full-term birth), maternal (perceived parenting stress) and dyadic (dyadic co-regulation) factors on IDS were explored. Results evidenced few differences between the groups on IDS linguistic characteristics. Moreover, observing the interaction of birth status and dyadic co-regulation, full-term mothers varied their IDS pragmatic features according to the quality of co-regulation while preterm mothers did not. Parenting stress was associated to specific linguistic IDS features independently from the birth status. Findings are discussed underling implications for the study of preterm dyads interactions and the importance to consider the interplay of several factors in affecting the quality of IDS.

Class inclusion versus quantifiers comprehension tasks: an experimental study with school-aged children.

Literature in developmental psychology pays special attention to the difficulties met by preschool children when confronted with (universal vs. existential) quantified sentences. According to the pivotal Piagetian view, the difficulties exhibited in quantifier comprehension during the preoperational period (age 2-6) derive from the same limitations in logical reasoning that cause bad performance outcomes in class inclusion problems. Nevertheless, as far as we know, a direct comparison between the two tasks has never been produced. In this research we tested the logical hypotheses concerning the failure in quantifier comprehension of preschool children by administering a sentence-picture matching task to two groups of children (5-6 vs. 7-8 years old). Pictures, obtained by partially pairing two entity sets, one of which outnumbers the other, were presented to participants. After each picture, children were asked to answer questions involving quantified versus class inclusion contents. Main findings showed that younger children performed the quantifier task worse than older children and their performance in that task was also worse with respect to the class inclusion task. This difference was not observed with older children who obtained better results than younger children in both tasks. These findings suggest that the specific abilities involved in solving the two problems evolve independently from each other during cognitive development. The results have been discussed in the light of the recent developmental theories.