Childhood maltreatment and maternal sensitivity to distress

Today, I am again looking at parenting of infants. Girod, Leerkes & Zvara (2023) published “Childhood Maltreatment Predicts Maternal Sensitivity to Distress: Negative attributions during the transition to parenthood” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the abstract:

Childhood maltreatment is a predictor of subsequent parenting behaviors; however, the mechanisms explaining this association have been understudied. The present study examined the indirect effect of childhood maltreatment on maternal sensitivity to distress via (a) emotion regulation difficulties, (b) negative attributions about infant crying, (c) minimizing attributions about infant crying, and (d) situational attributions about infant crying. The sample included 259 primiparous mothers (131 Black and 128 White) and their 6-month-old infants (52% female). Mothers retrospectively reported on their childhood history of maltreatment when their infants were about 2 years old. Emotion regulation difficulties and causal attributions about infant crying were assessed prenatally. Maternal sensitivity to distress was rated during three distress-eliciting tasks when children were 6 months old. Results from the structural equation model demonstrated that maternal childhood maltreatment was significantly positively associated with negative attributions about infant crying but not with emotion regulation difficulties, minimizing attributions, or situational attributions about crying. Furthermore, negative attributions about crying were associated with lower sensitivity to distress, and there was an indirect effect of childhood maltreatment on sensitivity to distress via negative attributions about infant distress. These effects were significant above and beyond the effects of coherence of mind, concurrent depressive symptoms, infant affect, maternal age, race, education, marital status, and income-to-needs ratio. The results suggest that altering negative attributions about infant crying may be an important area to intervene during the prenatal period to reduce continuity in maladaptive parenting across generations. 

This is a fairly large sample for a parenting study and a balanced sample of Black and White mothers, with data collected prenatally as well as at 6 months and 2 years. What I find most interesting is the connection between being maltreated as a child and holding negative attributions about crying – which is pretty common in babies. When new moms hold negative attributions about crying, they are more likely to be insensitive to their babies’ distress. The fact that emotion regulation difficulties, minimizing attributions, or situational attributions about crying are not significant is also intriguing as are all of the other measures that did not play significant roles. Their final sentence may also be helpful to clinicians working to reduce generational transmission of maladaptive parenting.