The emotional tone of child descriptions during pregnancy is associated with later parenting

Abstract

Introduction How parents think and feel about their young children has implications for the parent–child relationship. We examined prospective associations between prenatal descriptions of the unborn child's personality and later parenting behavior. Methods Pregnant women (N = 120; mean age = 26.16, SD = 5.71) were recruited in their third trimester for a longitudinal study. The sample is demographically diverse and predominantly economically disadvantaged. During prenatal interviews, women described their unborn child's personality, from which positive and negative emotion words were coded. Parenting behavior was coded 12 months postpartum (n = 105 for longitudinal analyses). Results Use of positive and negative words was negatively correlated (r = −.34, p < .001). Greater use of positive words to describe the unborn child's personality was associated with higher observed sensitivity, warmth, and engagement during mother–infant interactions, whereas negative words were associated with higher interference and lower levels of sensitivity. Mothers who used anxiety‐ and/or anger‐related words to describe their unborn child, relative to mothers who did not, demonstrated higher interference and lower warmth and sensitivity. Conclusion Descriptions of a child's personality before the child is born were associated with postnatal parenting behavior. Prenatal interventions that address negative thoughts and feelings regarding the child may be beneficial for promoting positive parenting postnatally.

Envisioning motherhood: Mental‐state language in caregiving narratives across the perinatal period

“…Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that maternal negative sentiment in representing the child may play a causal role in influencing child social development (Caspi et al, 2004; see also Hughes et al, 2017). These findings speak to the importance of assessing maternal sentiment in narratives, especially prenatally (Guyon-Harris et al, 2021). However, longitudinal stability in the valence of caregiving representations from pregnancy to postpartum as well as the covariance between parental consideration of mental states and the valence of caregiving representations within narratives remain unclear (see McMahon & Bernier, 2017).…”

“…The affective tone or valence of expectant mothers’ representations of their unborn infants constitutes an additional dimension of prenatal mother‐fetus relationships (Benoit et al., 1997; Pollock & Percy, 1999). More generally, affective analysis of parental language in narratives has linked positively‐valenced representations of the child (e.g., Demers et al., 2010a; Sher‐Censor, 2015) and prenatal representations of the unborn child (Guyon‐Harris et al., 2021) with positive caregiving behaviors. Of note, when maternal representations are probed in the context of difficult or negative parenting experiences, extensive references to positive emotions may be indicative of incongruent, maladaptive mentalization (Borelli et al., 2012).…”