The Nature and Structure of Mothers’ Parenting Their Infants

SYNOPSIS

Objective. To test three competing models of the nature and structure of maternal parenting practices with infants in U.S. national and multiple international samples. The three models were a one-factor dimensional model, a multi-factor style model, and a hybrid two-factor/six-domain model. Undertaking this evaluation of parenting with national and international samples permits a wide yet judicious analysis of culture-common versus culture-specific models of maternal parenting practices with young infants. Design. Basic caregiving practices of primiparous mothers with their 5-month-old infants during naturalistic interactions at home in nine different cultures were videorecorded, microcoded, and analyzed. Individual practices were organized into nurture, physical, social, didactic, material, and language domains. Results. In Study 1 using a U.S. sample (N = 360), analyses of the structure of mothers’ parenting practices yielded a best-fitting two-factor/six-domain structure. In Study 2, using a 9-nation sample (N = 653), the two-factor/six-domain structure was largely replicated and partial metric invariance achieved. Conclusions. Mothers’ parenting in the middle of the first year of their infant’s life is commonly structured and adapted to the universal needs and developmental tasks of infants’ surviving and thriving.

ADDRESS AND AFFILIATIONS

Marc H. Bornstein, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, 8404 Irvington Ave., Bethesda MD 20817, U.S.A. Email: [email protected]. Diane L. Putnick is at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and Gianluca Esposito is at the University of Trento.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosures

Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical Principles

The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Funding

MHB, DLP, and the research were supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH/NICHD, USA; MHB by an International Research Fellowship at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, UK, funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 695300-HKADeC-ERC-2015-AdG); and GE by Nanyang Technological University, NAP SUG 2015-2021 Grant.

Role of the Funders

None of the funders of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgements

We thank H. Azuma, S. Bali, L. Cote, A. De Houwer, C. Galperin, C.-S. Hahn, O. M. Haynes, C. Hendricks, M. Kabiru, M. Lim, S. Maital, M.-L. Moura de Seidl, M. Ogino, M.-G. Pêcheux, J.T.D. Suwalsky, P. Venuti, and A. Vyt. Our collaborators in each country are senior professionals and scholars who took active parts in the recruitment and conduct of this work. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ Institutions is not intended and should not be inferred. Dr. Jennifer E. Lansford served as Editor of this paper.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

¹ In this article, we refer to nations as the political entities where samples were recruited, but do not claim these samples are nationally representative. Every nation harbors different cultures. We refer to cultures as the entities in nations from which we recruited samples and to which our results are generalizable.