The goals of this study were to investigate (a) the dyadic relations of mothers' and children's perceptions of children's anxiety symptoms across development, (b) whether maternal perceptions of children's anxiety serve as a mediator of the association between maternal anxiety and child anxiety, and (c) whether sensitive/structured parenting…

A growing body of literature shows that adherence to some aspects of Western masculinity norms, including the suppression of emotional vulnerability, avoidance of seeking support from others, and exaggerated physical toughness, is associated with poorer psychological and social outcomes. While existing research suggests that parental gender…

This study examined parental romantic attachment security as a mediator of prospective associations between hostile interparental conflict and parental discipline (i.e., power-assertive, permissive, and inductive discipline) for mothers and fathers of young children. Furthermore, this study utilized a novel, automatic assessment of romantic…

This study examines the moment-to-moment within-person associations between maternal and child behaviors during a challenging puzzle task and compares these associations between mother--child dyads from the United States (n = 99, 52 boys, M[subscript child age] = 56.05 months, SD = 6.44) and China (n = 101, 46 boys, M[subscript child age] = 57.41…

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…

Racial discrimination is a salient and chronic stressor for ethnic minority parents that can negatively impact their parenting. The present study used a short-term longitudinal design to examine the link between Chinese American mothers' stressful experiences of racial discrimination and their authoritarian parenting practices, the mediating role…

The role of early child care experiences on the development of the mother--child attachment relationship has been studied extensively. However, no prospective studies of early child care have addressed how these experiences might be reflected in the content of attachment representations during adolescence and beyond. The goal of this study was to…

The current study examines the extent to which associations between internalizing problems, body mass index (BMI), and language skills from early (36 months) to late childhood (fifth grade) are due to relatively stable between-child differences, time-specific correlations, or cross-lagged paths. Data from the NICHD study, Early Child Care and…

The authors examined task-based (i.e., executive function), surveyed (i.e., effortful control), and physiological (i.e., resting cardiac respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) measures of child and maternal regulation as distinct moderators of longitudinal bidirectional links between child externalizing (EXT) behaviors and harsh parenting (HP) from 6…

This multistudy article examines whether children's susceptibility to their socialization experiences varies as a function of their dove temperament dispositions, an evolutionarily informed pattern of traits marked by a low threshold of environmental stimulation and greater behavioral flexibility across environmental contexts. Participants in…

A fundamental question in developmental science is how parental emotion socialization processes are associated with children's subsequent adaptation. Few extant studies have examined this question across multiple developmental periods and levels of analysis. Here, we tested whether mothers' supportive and nonsupportive reactions to their…

Although numerous individual studies have attempted to link child-parent attachment and prosociality, a systematic picture of that relationship requires a meta-analytic approach that considers different dimensions of prosociality and potential moderators. The current meta-analysis examined 41 studies drawn primarily from North America and Europe…

Observational studies have shown that caregiver sensitivity predicts child language skills. These studies, however, have entirely relied on between-family designs (single parent-child dyad per family), which cannot rule out the contribution of shared family confounds (e.g., genetics, books in home). The current study investigates whether observed…

The aim of this research was to develop a new observation-based measure for assessing caregivers' mind-mindedness in the preschool years and investigate whether this measure could explain the link between mothers' early appropriate mind-related comments and children's later mentalizing abilities. The new measure was developed using a sample of…

Prenatal and postpartum depression are highly prevalent worldwide, and emerging evidence suggests they contribute to impairments in children's executive functions. Studies of maternal depression, however, have focused on the postpartum and postnatal periods with relatively less consideration of prenatal influences on child development. This study…