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Household chaos is a construct often overlooked in studies of human development, despite its theoretical links with the integrity of individual well-being, family processes, and child development. The present longitudinal study examined relations between household chaos and well-established correlates of chaos (sociodemographic risk, major life events, and personal distress) and several constructs that, to date, are theoretically linked with chaos but never before assessed as correlates (quality of coparenting and emotional availability with infants at bedtime). In addressing this aim, we introduce a new measure of household chaos (the Descriptive In-home Survey of Chaos--Observer ReporteD, or DISCORD), wholly reliant on independent observer report, which draws from household chaos theory and prior empirical work but extends the measurement of chaos to include information about families' compliance with a home visiting protocol. Household chaos was significantly associated with socioeconomic risk, negative life events, less favorable coparenting, and less emotionally available bedtime parenting, but not with personal distress. These findings emphasize the need to examine household chaos as a direct and indirect influence on child and family outcomes, as a moderator of intervention attempts to improving parenting and child development, and as a target of intervention in its own right., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Although parents' structuring of infant sleep is complexly determined, little attention has been given to parents' marital and personal adjustment in shaping sleep arrangement choices. Linkages were examined between infant sleep arrangements at 1 and 6 months and mothers' marital adjustment, co-parenting quality, and depressive symptoms. The final study sample was composed of 149 families (53% girl infants, 86% European American). Bed sharing mothers had lower co-parenting quality, and, at 6 months, more depressive symptoms than mothers of infants in solitary sleep. One-month co-parenting quality was associated with predictable shifts in sleep arrangements from 1 to 6 months, but 1-month sleep arrangements did not predict changes in personal or co-parenting quality. Findings emphasize the need for greater attention to marital and emotional health in influencing family-level decisions about infant sleep arrangements., (© 2015 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

Mothers' depressive symptoms, coparenting quality, maternal and infant sleep, and infant temperament during infants' first 6 months were examined as predictors of mothers' emotional availability (EA) at bedtime with their infants at 9 months. Maternal EA was assessed from video recordings of mother-infant interactions. Whereas mother-reported coparenting quality was both directly and indirectly predictive of EA, changes in depressive symptoms during the first 6 months only predicted lower EA when infants were temperamentally highly surgent. These results suggest that the influences on emotional availability during bedtime are complex, with maternal resources as well as infant temperament playing important influential roles.

The transition to parenthood can be stressful for new parents, as parents must learn to take on new roles and responsibilities. Sleep disruption--which has been linked in prior research to parent distress and fatigue--is common in the early months. The current study is the first to our knowledge to examine infant sleep and its potential indirect influence on parents' perceptions of coparenting quality at 1 and 3 months of infant age. Participants included 150 families. Mothers reported more night waking, poorer sleep quality, more depressive symptoms, and worse perceptions of coparenting quality as compared with fathers. We tested a structural model of infant and parent night waking and sleep quality as predictors of parent distress and coparenting using maximum likelihood estimation. The frequency of infant night waking predicted father and mother night waking, which in turn predicted parent sleep quality. Poor parent sleep quality predicted elevated depressive symptoms, and depressive symptoms were negatively related to perceptions of coparenting quality. Significant indirect effects between infant night waking and parent depression and coparenting quality were found. In summary, both mothers' and fathers' perceptions of coparenting were related to the unfolding of parental dynamics that take place surrounding infant sleep difficulties. This held true even after controlling for parent education, family income, and infant temperament. Therefore, coparenting may indirectly benefit from interventions targeting infant sleep difficulties., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.)

Mechanisms were examined to clarify relations between maternal depressive symptoms, dysfunctional cognitions, and infant night waking among 45 infants (1-24 months) and their mothers. A mother-driven mediational model was tested in which maternal depressive symptoms and dysfunctional cognitions about infant sleep predicted infant night waking via their impact on mothers' bedtime and nighttime behavior with infants (from video). Two infant-driven mediational models were also examined, in which infant night waking predicted maternal depressive symptoms, or dysfunctional cognitions, via their impact on nighttime maternal behavior. Stronger support for the mother-driven model was obtained, which was further supported by qualitative observations from video-recordings. This study provides important insights about maternal depression's effects on nighttime parenting, and how such parenting affects infant sleep., (© 2012 The Authors. Child Development © 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

In this lead paper for this special section, we advance the perspective that new insights into parenting at risk can be gained by focusing on the dynamic emotional processes that occur during parent-child exchanges, with special emphasis on parental emotions as experienced and their regulation of emotion and underlying cognitions, as well as the role of developmentally rooted cognitions in shaping these associations. We discuss the very few but germinal studies that embody this perspective and introduce work in this section that examines emotion dynamics during parenting in real time. We believe this perspective will move us beyond static conceptualizations of parenting at risk, broadens our understanding of parenting as a process, and accelerates our ability to identify the essential targets of intervention when parenting is at risk.

Background: Ecological and transactional theories link child outcomes to accumulated risk. This study hypothesized that cumulative risk was negatively related to attachment, and that maternal sensitivity mediated linkages between risk and attachment., Methods: One hundred and twelve high-risk African-American premature infant-mother dyads participated. Psychosocial (maternal depression, stress and self-efficacy) and sociodemographic risk (poverty, maternal education, marital status) were maternal self-report (0-4 months). Infant health risk was obtained from hospital charts. Infant-mother attachment (12 months) and maternal sensitivity (4 months) were assessed with Q-sort measures., Findings: Psychosocial and sociodemographic risk, but not infant health risk, negatively related to attachment. Both were mediated by maternal sensitivity., Conclusions: The impact of risk domains on attachment security was mediated by maternal sensitivity. Results emphasize the need for early intervention programs targeting premature infants to identify and address environmental and personal factors that place parenting at risk., (© 2011 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry © 2011 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.)

In the present study, linkages were examined between parental behaviors (maternal practices) at bedtime, emotional availability of mothering at bedtime, and infant sleep quality in a cross-sectional sample of families with infants between 1 and 24 months of age. Observations of maternal behaviors and maternal emotional availability were conducted independently by 2 sets of trained observers who were blind to data being coded by the other. With infant age statistically controlled, specific maternal behaviors at bedtime were unrelated to infant sleep disruptions at bedtime and during the night. By contrast, emotional availability of mothering at bedtime was significantly and inversely related to infant sleep disruption, and, although these links were stronger for younger infants, they were significant for older infants as well. Maternal emotional availability was also inversely linked with mothers' ratings of whether their infants had sleep difficulties. These findings demonstrate that parents' emotional availability at bedtimes may be as important, if not more important, than bedtime practices in predicting infant sleep quality. Results support the theoretical premise that parents' emotional availability to children in sleep contexts promotes feelings of safety and security and, as a result, better-regulated child sleep., ((c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.)

Despite long-standing research, the relations between power assertive discipline and child adjustment continue to be debated. Disentangling disciplinary practices from the parent-child emotional climate may aid understanding of how such parenting practices impact child adjustment. This study explored longitudinal relations between maternal emotional involvement, power assertive discipline, and child adjustment in a sample of 35 mothers of infant, toddler, and preschool-age children. Results indicate that power assertive discipline may differentially impact child adjustment, depending on levels of maternal emotional involvement.