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The focus of this thesis is on the early caregiving environment and social interactions\ud of preterm infants.\ud Chapter one introduces the topic of premature delivery, including infant outcomes,\ud parent’s caregiving role, infant’s role in their own development, and dyadic interactions\ud between parents and their premature infants.\ud Chapter two introduces methodological difficulties in the study of preterm infants.\ud The chapter also provides an overview of the longitudinal study of preterm infants’\ud development that provided the majority of the data for this thesis.\ud Chapter three introduces a new measure of parenting principles and practices, the\ud Baby Care Questionnaire (BCQ). The BCQ measures how parents approach caring for their\ud infant in three contexts – sleeping, feeding and soothing. The chapter documents the\ud development and psychometric properties of the BCQ.\ud Chapter four studies the impact of premature birth on maternal cognitions and\ud principles about caregiving. The chapter presents data on the consistency of maternal\ud cognitions about child development and caregiving at an individual and group level.\ud Chapter five studies the impact of premature birth on infant attention, in particular\ud social attention. The chapter reports data on the style of preterm infants’ looking to a novel\ud stimulus, how these infants followed an experimenter’s attention to a target and their\ud regulation abilities (as reported by their mother).\ud Chapter six studies the impact of premature birth on interactions between mothers and\ud their infants. The chapter uses statistical techniques to represent streams of behaviour to\ud examine different responding to person- and object-directed behaviours by mothers and their\ud premature infants.\ud Chapter seven brings together these findings and discusses future work.

Background: The division of non-paid labor in heterosexual parents in the West is usually still gender-based, with mothers taking on the majority of direct caregiving responsibilities. However, in same-sex couples, gender cannot be the deciding factor. Inspired by Feinberg's ecological model of co-parenting, this study investigated whether infant temperament, parent factors (biological relatedness to child, psychological adjustment, parenting stress, and work status), and partner relationship quality explained how first-time gay, lesbian, and heterosexual parents divided labor (childcare and family decision-making) when their infants were 4 and 12 months old. We also tested whether family type acted as a moderator. Method: Participants were drawn from the new parents study. Only those who provided information about their biological relatedness to their child (N = 263 parents) were included. When infants were 4 months (T1), parents completed a password-protected online questionnaire exploring their demographic characteristics including work status and standardized online-questionnaires on task division (childcare and family decision-making), infant temperament, parental anxiety, parental depression, parental stress, and partner relationship satisfaction. When infants were 12-months-old (T2), parents provided information about task division and their biological relatedness to their children. Results: Linear mixed models showed that no factor explained the division of family decision making at T1 and T2. For relative time spent on childcare tasks at T1, biological relatedness mattered for lesbian mothers only: biologically related mothers appeared to spend more time on childcare tasks than did non-related mothers. Results showed that, regardless of family type, parents who were not working or were working part-time at T1 performed more childcare tasks at T1. This was still true at T2. The other factors did not significantly contribute to relative time spent on childcare tasks at T2. Conclusion: We had the opportunity to analyze the division of non-paid tasks in families where parenting was necessarily planned and in which gender could not affect that division. Although Feinberg's model of co-parenting suggests that various factors are related to task division, we found that paid work outside the home was most important during the first year of parenthood in determining caregiving roles.