Children’s representational models of self and relationship quality with caregivers in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV) were investigated using family drawings created by children in their first-grade year. The present study examines the mediating role of mothers’ and fathers’ sensitive parenting behaviors in the relations between IPV and children’s representations of relationship quality with mothers and fathers. The sample ( N = 947) is drawn from a longitudinal study of rural poverty exploring the ways in which child, family, and contextual factors shape development over time. Results of analyses indicate significant associations between IPV, sensitive parenting, and children’s representation of relationship quality with mothers and fathers. There was a significant indirect effect from IPV on children’s representation of relationship quality with fathers through paternal parenting behaviors. The findings from this study suggest that exposure to violence may affect how children view their family relationships and that fathers’ parenting behavior is a key mediating process. Implications of the findings and directions for future study are proposed.

Objective The current study examined the contributions of cultural and economic contexts and family, child, and parent characteristics to explain variation within and between mothers' and fathers' mental state talk (i.e., cognition, desire, modulation of assertion, and other mental state talk) to their 6-month-old infants. Background Growing evidence supports the importance of mental state talk for children, yet few studies have examined factors that might contribute to this type of verbal input. Method In a sample of 582 African American and European American mothers and 582 African American and European American fathers living in low-wealth rural areas, we explored the extent to which cultural context (ethnicity), economic context (income), family characteristics (partners' use of mental state talk), child characteristics (gender, attention, distress to novelty), and parent characteristics (parental sensitivity) contribute to mothers' and fathers' use of mental state talk in a series of multilevel models. Results Results suggest that parental sensitivity was positively associated with mental state talk for both mothers and fathers, and child attention was positively associated with mental state talk for mothers with significant but small effect sizes. Fathers' mental state talk contributed positively to mothers' mental state talk, but this was true only for African American families. Conclusion Our identified main effects and significant interaction enhance our understanding of factors that contribute to mothers' and fathers' mental state talk with their preverbal infants.

In this article, we describe the history of psychological research on marriage and consider how marital relationships affect other family relationships and the social and emotional development of young children. Marital relationships can support or undermine the parenting of young children and are themselves affected by parenting. Marital interactions also are observed by the child and can be a critical source of learning about adult relationships, of modeling of behaviors related to conflict or emotional display, and of security or fear to a child when either reassuring or frightening behaviors are displayed by marital couples. We discuss these topics across a wide range of diverse family systems, including Western racial and ethnic minority couples, non-Western couples, and LGBT couples.

In a sample of 127 mother–infant dyads, this study examined the predictive significance of mothers' physiological and observed emotional responding within distressing and nondistressing caregiving contexts at 6 months for infant attachment assessed with Fraley and Spieker's (2003) dimensional approach and the categorical approach at 12 months. Findings revealed that a lesser degree of maternal respiratory sinus arrhythmia withdrawal and higher levels of maternal neutral (vs. positive) affect within distressing (vs. nondistressing) caregiving contexts were distinctive antecedents of avoidance versus resistance assessed dimensionally (but not categorically), independent of maternal sensitivity. Discussion focuses on the usefulness of examining mothers' physiological and affective responding, considering the caregiving context, and employing the dimensional approach to attachment in identifying unique antecedents of patterns of attachment insecurity.

This study examined relations between father-child attachment security and both paternal sensitivity and fathers' pleasure in parenting. At 12 months of age sensitivity was coded from father-infant interactions and pleasure in parenting was coded from fathers' interviews assessing attitudes toward the parenting role. Father-child dyads participated in the Strange Situation Procedure assessing attachment relationship quality. Sensitivity was related to more pleasure in parenting, but neither variable alone predicted attachment security. However, pleasure in parenting moderated the association between sensitivity and attachment. Moreover, the concordance between sensitivity and pleasure in parenting differed markedly across attachment classifications. In secure relationships fathers showed strong concordance between sensitivity and pleasure in parenting. Fathers in avoidant relationships demonstrated high sensitivity coupled with low pleasure in parenting, whereas fathers in disorganized relationships showed low sensitivity coupled with high pleasure in parenting. Results speak to the importance of integrating cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of parenting in father-child attachment research.

Identifying skills at entry to school that promote academic success has been a major goal for policy and research. The current study categorized school-entry skills as academic (i.e., math and reading skills), cognitive (i.e., language and executive functioning), and social-emotional (i.e., externalizing and internalizing problems) skills and asked to what extent each predicted school-age skills. Data were drawn from the Family Life Project, a representative birth cohort study of 1292 children living in low-wealth rural communities. Children's academic, cognitive, and social-emotional skills were assessed prior to kindergarten and used to predict longitudinal trajectories in math, reading, language, and social-emotional skills from kindergarten through third grade. Findings indicate that school-entry skills within a given domain were the strongest predictor of the level of school-age skills within that domain, but the magnitude of those associations diminished over time. Higher levels of language and executive function, and lower levels of internalizing problems were the only school-entry skills to predict larger gains in skills during the first four years of elementary school. These results suggest that greater focus on both cognitive and social-emotional skills during early childhood may be warranted. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Early literacy skills play an important role in children's success in school. Especially important to better literacy skills may be the quality of the classroom environment (emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support) across the early years of schooling. This study used an a priori threshold of quality approach to understanding the possible link between the number of years of better classroom quality over four years, from kindergarten through third grade, in relation to children's literacy skills by third grade. This study examined a representative sample of 1292 children followed from birth who lived in low-wealth rural counties in the United States. These children were followed into school with classroom observations conducted each year from kindergarten through third grade and literacy related achievement measures in pre-kindergarten and third grade. Findings suggested that even after controlling for poverty related variables, the quality of the home environment, school entry literacy skills, and teacher rated literacy instruction, children who had more years of better classroom quality had higher third grade literacy scores. Additionally, we found an interaction effect, suggesting that children who entered kindergarten with lower emergent literacy skills benefited more from a greater number of years of better classroom quality in relation to reading comprehension in third grade. Thus, more years of better classroom quality may help in narrowing the gap between those who enter kindergarten with higher literacy skills and those who enter with lower literacy skills. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A growing literature provides evidence of long-term effects of childhood sexual trauma (CST), however the intergenerational consequences of CST are not well understood. In the current study we examine the adjustment of children whose mothers reported a history of CST compared to children whose mothers did not report childhood trauma across multiple domains of functioning. Data for these analyses were obtained from a longitudinal study of low-income, rural families. Propensity score matching (PSM) methodology was used to create a contrast group matched on maternal family of origin variables in an effort to isolate and examine the long-term associations of maternal CST history beyond the effects of other childhood adversities such as poverty (total N = 204). After controlling for numerous child and primary caregiver covariates, findings indicate that a maternal history of CST is related to higher levels of teacher reports of behavioral problems and academic skills in the classroom setting in Kindergarten and First grade. This study adds to the growing literature on the effects of maternal CST on offspring development. Implications for interventions with children with mothers reporting a history of CST and directions for future study are proposed.

Previous studies suggest that the roots of school dropout (a) can be established early in life, (b) are likely to involve multilevel factors (home, child, classroom) operating prior to and during the elementary school years, and (c) can be identified by 3rd grade. The decision to drop out of school is thus a dynamic developmental process that can begin with disengagement in elementary school. Yet few studies have examined the multilevel factors that might contribute to children's early disengagement from school. In the present study, we examined associations between household chaos (i.e., disorganization and instability) from birth to age 5 and student (dis)engagement in third grade. We also examined positive parenting in early childhood (6-60 months) and child self-regulatory skills at kindergarten as potential mediators in this pathway. Participants were 1,097 children who participated in the Family Life Project, a longitudinal study of the development of children living in underresourced high poverty rural areas. Study questions were addressed using structural equation models. Results indicated that, even after taking into account a considerable number of covariates, early positive parenting and children's self-regulatory skills were viable process mechanisms through which early household disorganization, but not instability, was linked to student (dis)engagement in third grade. Findings are discussed with respect to the multilevel proximal forces at play in children's risk for early disengagement from school. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The gap in school readiness skills between children growing up in poverty and other children has become a major policy issue as increasing proportions of families are living in poverty, especially in low-wealth rural communities. The purpose of this paper was to document the degree to which depth, persistence, and timing of poverty was related to the early development of children in a representative sample of 1,292 families in two of the four poor rural regions in the United States, labeled Appalachia and the Black South. Analyses documented the emergence of the poverty gap in the child's first 5 years of life, asking when the gap emerged and whether it continued to grow through the early childhood period. Findings indicated that families who experienced poverty during the child's first 2-years showed substantially lower cognitive, language, executive functioning, and social skills by 2 to 3 years of age (0.5 to 1.0 SD difference) and these gaps appeared to stabilize between 3 and 5 years of age. Transitions into deep poverty during the preschool period (3- to 5-years) were also related to substantially lower scores, and to a lesser extent, transitions out of poverty were related to higher skill levels. Accounting for baseline demographic and maternal characteristics diminished the poverty gap, but did not eliminate it. The poverty gaps at 3-years in language, executive functioning, and social skills accounted for much of the poverty gaps observed at 5-years. Policy implications for early care and education programming are discussed. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This article examined longitudinal relations among socioeconomic risk, maternal language input, child vocabulary, and child executive function (EF) in a large sample (N = 1,009) recruited for a prospective longitudinal study. Two measures of maternal language input derived from a parent-child picture book task, vocabulary diversity (VOCD), and language complexity, showed variation by socioeconomic risk at child ages 15, 24, and 36 months. Maternal VOCD at child age 24 months and maternal language complexity at child age 36 months mediated the relation between socioeconomic risk and 48-month child EF, independent of parenting sensitivity. Moreover, 36-month child vocabulary mediated the relation between maternal language input and child EF. These findings provide novel evidence about mechanisms linking socioeconomic risk and child executive function.

Using a longitudinal, cross-lagged design, this study examined the bidirectional relations between mothers' and fathers' sensitivity and children's externalizing (EXT) and internalizing (INT) behavior from middle childhood into adolescence. The subsample comprised families (N = 578) in which the mother and father cohabitated from the study's first time point (child age = 54 months) through Age 15 in the longitudinal NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Study results revealed differential patterns for mother-child and father-child relations in the full sample and separately for males and females. The full cross-lagged models revealed that child EXT behavior predicted maternal sensitivity, but not vice versa, and fathers' sensitivity and child behavior were reciprocally interrelated. There was a significant indirect pathway from early paternal sensitivity to later EXT in males, and from early maternal sensitivity to INT in females. The results point to the important roles that fathers play in child INT and EXT behaviors and important differences between males and females. (PsycINFO Database Record

Role confusion is a deviation in the parent-child relationship such that a parent looks to a child to meet the parent's emotional needs and abdicates, in part, the parental role in exchange for care, intimacy, or peer support from the child. In addition, a child may initiate role-confused behavior in order to gain closeness to a parent who is otherwise preoccupied by his or her own needs. The current study examined associations between mother-child role confusion at age 5 (we coded role confusion from filmed free-play mother-child interactions) and teacher reports of internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and peer problems, at Grade 1. The sample (N = 557) is from a longitudinal study of families in rural communities, the Family Life Project. Mother-child role confusion predicted internalizing symptoms and peer problems (but not externalizing symptoms) above and beyond other dimensions of maternal parenting (sensitivity and harsh intrusiveness), demographic factors, and prior levels of outcome variables. However, some effect sizes were small, making replication desirable. Temperament and child sex were important moderators: girls with difficult temperaments and boys with easy temperaments were more vulnerable to internalizing symptoms (but not externalizing symptoms or peer problems) in the context of role confusion. We discuss the singular importance of role confusion, a construct that has been largely unrecognized by developmental psychologists until recently, for behavioral outcomes of children as they transition into middle childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record

Little research has examined the legacy of early maternal care for later attachment representations among low-income and ethnic minority school-aged children. Using data from a sample of 276 rural, low-income, African-American families, this study examined associations between maternal care in infancy and children's representations of attachment figures in middle childhood. Maternal care was coded from 10-min home-based observations at 6, 15, and 24months of age. Representations of attachment figures were assessed using the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task at 6years of age. Sensitive maternal care in infancy was not significantly related to attachment security or episodic disorganized behaviors in children's representations. However, children exposed to more harsh-intrusive parenting during infancy displayed less secure representations of attachment figures in middle childhood and more episodic disorganized behaviors, even after controlling for numerous child and family contextual covariates. Findings inform conceptualizations of attachment formation among rural, low-income, African-American parent-child dyads.

Consistent with the gustatory-vagal hypothesis, vagal stimulation during breastfeeding may contribute to infants' physiological regulatory development independent of caregiving effects. This study examined whether breastfeeding predicted 6-month-old infants' (N = 151) and their mothers' vagal regulation during the face-to-face still-face (FFSF). Although breastfed and nonbreastfed infants showed expected vagal withdrawal during the Still-Face episode, only breastfed infants showed continued withdrawal during the reunion episode, suggesting greater physiological mobilization to repair the interaction. Breastfeeding mothers showed higher vagal tone than nonbreastfeeding mothers at baseline, suggesting greater capacity for regulation, and throughout the FFSF, suggesting calmer states. Breastfeeding effects were independent of maternal sensitivity. Findings suggest that infants' and mothers' physiological regulation may be shaped by breastfeeding independently of associated social factors.

In a sample of 127 mother-infant dyads, this study examined the predictive significance of mothers' physiological and observed emotional responding within distressing and nondistressing caregiving contexts at 6 months for infant attachment assessed with Fraley and Spieker's (2003) dimensional approach and the categorical approach at 12 months. Findings revealed that a lesser degree of maternal respiratory sinus arrhythmia withdrawal and higher levels of maternal neutral (vs. positive) affect within distressing (vs. nondistressing) caregiving contexts were distinctive antecedents of avoidance versus resistance assessed dimensionally (but not categorically), independent of maternal sensitivity. Discussion focuses on the usefulness of examining mothers' physiological and affective responding, considering the caregiving context, and employing the dimensional approach to attachment in identifying unique antecedents of patterns of attachment insecurity.

This study examined the independent and mediated associations between maternal depression symptoms (MDS), mother-child interaction, and child executive function (EF) in a prospective longitudinal sample of 1,037 children (50% boys) from predominantly low-income and rural communities. When children were 6, 15 and 24 months of age, mothers reported their level of depressive symptomatology. At 24 and 36 months of age, mother-child interactions during play were rated for warmth-sensitivity and harsh-intrusiveness, and dyadic joint attention and maternal language complexity were assessed from a book sharing activity. Children's EF (i.e., inhibitory control, working memory, and set shifting) were assessed at ages 36 and 48 months using a battery of six tasks. Results indicated that MDS at ages 15 and 24 months were negatively associated with children's EF at age 48 months. Additionally, harsh-intrusive mother-child interactions partially mediated this link. Although warmth-sensitivity, dyadic joint attention and maternal language complexity were all longitudinally related to EF, they did not serve as mediating mechanisms between MDS and EF. These results were obtained while controlling for multiple demographic factors, children's earlier cognitive abilities, maternal general distress and childcare experiences. Findings from this study identify 1 mechanism through which early exposure to MDS could be related to children's EF. (PsycINFO Database Record