OBJECTIVE To study how the early crying behavior of preterm infants at term, 6 weeks, and 5 months of corrected age is related to later behavioral problems at age 3 and 4 years and parenting stress at 2 and 4 years. METHODS The study group included 202 live-born, low birth weight infants (birth weight ≤1500 g) born from January 2001 through December 2006 at the Turku University Hospital, Finl...

Both contextual risk and sensitive parenting have been associated with children's social However, it is not clear how sensitive parenting might impact children's social skill development in the context of accumulation of risk. The current study tests two possible models. The first model, based on Rutters' (1979) tests the theory that cumulative risk may moderate the relationship between sensiti...

The present study investigated whether cortisol stress responses of 6-year-olds were associated with their behavioral functioning at school. Additionally, the moderating role of stress in the family environment was examined. To this end, 149 healthy children (Mage  = 6.09 years; 70 girls) participated in an age-appropriate innovative social evaluative stress test. Saliva cortisol samples were c...

This study investigated parenting stress trajectories among low-income young mothers and the factors that are associated with change and stability of parenting stress as children aged from 14 to 36 months old. With a sample of 580 young mothers who applied to the Early Head Start Program, growth mixture modeling identified 3 trajectory classes of parenting stress: a chronically high group (7% o...

OBJECTIVE To examine the psychosocial stressors experienced by fathers of children diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. METHODS Thirty-one fathers whose children (ages 6 to 19) were participating in pediatric HIV clinical trials completed self-report measures of parenting stress, psychological distress, and need for psychosocial services. RESULTS Over half of this sample experienced significantly eleva...

What is common in aggression and in abusive/neglectful parenting is low levels of empathy. Fostering empathy – the ability to identify with another person’s feelings – can serve as an antidote to aggression and is crucial to good parenting. Poor parenting and aggression cut across all socioeconomic levels of the community and, as such, empathy needs to be fostered in all children. During the pe...

This study examined the relationship between the broader autism phenotype (BAP) and depressed mood in mothers of children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). One hundred and sixty-five mothers (71 with an ASD child and 94 with a non-ASD child) completed a survey of child autism severity (ASD mothers only), parenting stress, BAP, and depression. Mothers of children with ASD reporte...

BACKGROUND Preterm birth has been associated with increased parenting stress in early infancy, and some reports have found this to be a risk factor for later behavioral problems. There are, however, few studies and conflicting results. Information about the fathers is scarce. OBJECTIVES Our goal was to study the effects of an early-intervention program on parenting stress after a preterm birt...

A family-centered approach to the support of families with a young child with an intellectual or developmental disability has been widely adopted in the last decade. While some of the foundational assumptions of family-centered theory have been tested, there remain considerable gaps in the research evidence for this approach. While parenting stress and competence have been examined in the gener...

Researchers commonly report that families of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience more parenting stress than families of typically developing (TD) children or those diagnosed with other disabilities [e.g., Down syndrome (DS), cerebral palsy, intellectual disability]. The authors reexamined the research using comparison groups to investigate parenting stress and conducted a me...