The aim of the longitudinal study was to examine, for the first time in a Nordic country, whether autonomous parenting in infancy affects psychosocial adjustment in preadolescence. Attachment representations of mothers and fathers were investigated with the Adult Attachment Interview in a community sample of two-parent Finnish families. Most mothers and fathers were classified as autonomous, a finding which is in line with normative Western distributions. Moreover, the ratio of dismissing versus preoccupied adults was similar to Western norms. Demographic characteristics such as family structure and years of education differentiated autonomous from non-autonomous mothers. In preadolescence, the children who had experienced at least one autonomous parent were more empathic and had fewer problems in social relationships and thought processes compared to children of two non-autonomous parents. The findings suggest that autonomous parenting has long-term parent gender specific influences on children's psychosocial adjustment.

Some mothers who have recently lost a significant attachment figure may become mentally incoherent and sporadically even enter a trancelike, dissociative state. Such states of mind have been shown to predict infant attachment disorganization. Infants born close to the time of a parental loss are at a greater risk for intergenerational trauma. A background of maternal substance abuse is also known to increase such risk. We illustrate by way of a case study how a mother-infant group psychotherapy programme aimed at substance-abusing mothers may help to prevent the transmission of mother's unresolved trauma to the infant. Another goal was to discuss how attachment-derived methods (namely, Adult Attachment Interview, Strange Situation Procedure and the Emotional Availability Scales) may aid in understanding the effects of the intervention.

Growth modeling was applied to monolingual (N ¼ 26) and bilingual (N ¼ 28) word learning from 14 to 36 months. Level and growth rate of vocabulary were lower for Finnish-Russian bilinguals than for Finnish monolinguals. Processing of Finnish speech sounds at 7 but not at 11 months predicted level, but not growth rate of vocabulary in both Finnish and Russian; this relationship was the same for monolinguals and bilinguals. The bilinguals' two vocabularies developed differently, showing no acceleration in Russian, the minority language. Even though the bilinguals progressed more slowly in each home language, they were learning at least as many new words as the monolinguals when Finnish and Russian vocabularies were counted together. Keywords bilingual first language acquisition, learning Finnish and Russian words, longitudinal study, speech perception in infancy, vocabulary growthDescribing the normative course of bilingual development has turned out to be a highly challenging task. It is still not well known how progression in learning two languages depends on age of acquisition, (dis)similarity and status of the language pairs, and context of exposure, as also recognized by Werker and ByersHeinlein (2008) and Bosch and Ramon-Casas (2014, this issue). Our goal was to examine early precursors to bilingual vocabulary growth; especially by examining how bilingual versus monolingual exposure from birth and speech perception in infancy relate to word learning in toddlerhood.

The question of how mothers' and fathers' representations of attachment correlate ten years later with children's perceptions of attachment relationships was examined in a longitudinal study on Finnish families (N = 42). The parents completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) during the child's first year of life. At 11 years, the children filled out three scales on how secure they perceive the relationship with each parent. Parents' AAI classifications and AAI dimensions based on continuous scales were used as predictors of the preadolescents' attachment security. Regression analyses demonstrated that fathers' but not mothers' State-of-Mind and Experience dimensions predicted preadolescents' security of attachment to father. The discussion focuses on the predictive validity of the classical categorical versus the recently proposed continuous approach and the different roles of parents in transmitting security from one generation to another.