Paternal and Maternal Reflective Functioning in the Western Australian Peel Child Health Study

Abstract

While past research on the care of infants has been mostly with mothers, in recent times there has been a renewed attention to the father-infant relationship. This study examined differences between mother and father parental reflective functioning (PRF) or parental mentalizing; that is, the parental capacity to reason about their own and their children's behaviors by taking into consideration intentional mental states. Data were collected from 120 couples with a 1-year-old child who were participants in the West Australian Peel Child Health Study. Parental mentalizing was assessed using the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ; Luyten, Mayes, Nijssens, & Fonagy, ). Results showed that mother and father mentalizing with their children was independent and that mothers scored slightly higher levels of mentalizing than did fathers. Paternal mentalizing was weakly associated with family income and father education, and was more strongly associated with family functioning than with maternal mentalizing. Implications for theorizing on PRF and fatherhood more generally are discussed.

Convergent Validity of Three Measures of Reflective Function: Parent Development Interview, Parental Reflective Function Questionnaire, and Reflective Function Questionnaire

“…To date, the validity and reliability of the RFQ and the PRFQ have been determined mostly in clinical, but not normative or non-clinical samples (Luyten et al, 2012a;Badoud et al, 2015;Fonagy et al, 2016;Morandotti et al, 2018). Moreover, the distinction between mothers' and fathers' capacity for RF have been examined predominately in clinical samples (Fonagy et al, 1991b;Cooke et al, 2017), with fathers' RF given less attention. To develop a better understanding of parental RF of mothers and fathers, further research with a community sample is needed.…”

Psychometric Evaluation of the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire in Chinese Parents

“…Studies have found that parents with high PRF showed positive parenting practices (Stacks et al, 2014;Rostad and Whitaker, 2016;Luyten et al, 2017) were more tolerant for distress of their children (Rutherford et al, 2013(Rutherford et al, , 2015 and had less parenting stress (Luyten et al, 2017). Meanwhile, parents with high PRF can not only take a perspective from their children, but also understand each member of the family better, and thus improve the level of family functioning (Cooke et al, 2017). Therefore, the correlations between PRF, parental warmth, parenting stress, and family functioning were conducted in the criteria validity analysis.…”

Reflective functioning in fathers with young children born preterm and at term

“…Research on the assessment of mentalization has led to an index known as Parental Reflective Functioning (Slade, 2005), which has been used successfully to predict the quality of parent-child relationships (Fonagy, Steele, Moran, Steele, & Higgitt, 1991;Kelly, Slade, & Grienenberger, 2005). Although studies on Reflective Functioning (RF) in fathers (specifically of young children) are rare (for an overview see Benbassat & Priel, 2015), there is evidence that levels of RF in both parents are similar (see Steele & Steele, 2008;Taubner et al, 2013), whereas other studies show differences with fathers scoring lower than mothers (Benbassat-Lifshitz, 2008;Cooke, Priddis, Luyten, Kendall, & Cavanagh, 2017).…”