The current study focuses on infants' sleep-wake states in group child care and relations of those states to infant-caregiver interactions. Qualitative case studies were conducted with four infants (3-7 months old) in an infant room at a child care centre. Video-recordings were the main format for data collection with the four infants and video…

Infant mental health is strongly connected to an infant's relationship with a responsive, warm, and available caregiver. However, maternal mental illness reduces a mother's ability to detect and respond to changes in her infant's expressions and communication, which may have important consequences for infant attachment and emotion regulation. The…

Parents play an influential role in children's emotional development. Numerous quantitative studies have examined the correlations between a "single" dimension of parents' emotion socialisation practices (e.g. parental emotion expression or attitudes) and children's emotional development. However, little attention has been paid to a…

This study focuses on a particular relationship between teachers and one- to three-year-old children: the child in the teacher's lap. When, in what situations, does this happen? Who are the children in the teacher's lap? Why are they there? How do children express emotional well-being when in the teacher's lap? Relational, sociocultural and…

Most research on parenting has focused on dyadic parent-child interactions to the neglect of triadic interactions between mother, father and child. Drawing from an evolutionary perspective, the present study examined how parental warmth and investment change as a function of the other parent's presence. Our sample consisted of 87 two-parent Dutch…