The role of pre-birth parent characteristics in early family development.

ABSTRACT

In designing early intervention studies, it is important to consider how the nature of pre-birth parent personality and marital characteristics influence family and child development. Descriptions of the development of three families show the specific impact of these pre-birth characteristics on the quality of the parent-infant transaction of infant soothability-responsiveness to need. Further focus is provided by linking the parent's responsiveness to the infant's need to the emergence and resolution of ambivalent feelings about caring for the infant. The variations in the resolution of ambivalent feelings and the parental personality and marital context of that resolution are explored. Three such configurations are illustrated a competent mother whose ambivalence appeared in the context of difficulty with intimacy; a mother who struggled with intensely loving and hostile feelings generally; and the description of the emergence of maternal ambivalence in the context of difficulty in achieving psychological separation from her child. Finally, quantitative indices are used to compare these three instances of difficulty in resolving ambivalence with two families whose resolution of the ambivalence was optimal.