Thus, the question remains: Does
improving maternal responses to infant crying offer an opportunity to support healthy infant development in this context?
«The close contact also helps a mother recognize and become familiar with her infant's signals, which leads to more
sensitive maternal response,» she says.
Depression may
affect maternal response via altered sensitivity to their infant's signal.34 Schuetze and Zeskind34 show that perception of infant crying varies with level of maternal depression: as the level of depression increases, infant crying is perceived as less urgent and sick - sounding (i.e., less aversive and less arousing).
Postnatal weight gain was taken from pediatric records, and the frequency of side effects was measured
by maternal response to the interview questionnaire.
Greater maternal response was associated with a greater decrease in both internalizing (adjusted mean difference, − 3.4; P <.001) and externalizing (− 3.7; P <.001) symptoms in the children, when tested in a linear regression model controlling for child age, sex, and severity of symptoms at baseline, as well as maternal baseline HRSD and household income.
Since Bowlby's work, the definition of maternal deprivation has grown to include not only maternal absence but also
ineffective maternal response.
Results indicate that a main effect
for maternal response to child distress, with mothers assigned to COS - P reporting fewer unsupportive (but not more supportive) responses to distress than control group mothers.
Autism was measured from an
affirmative maternal response to the question, «Has a doctor or health professional ever told you your child has autism?»
Hrdy shows how extraordinary differences in mothering behavior have occurred, historically and contemporaneously, as a consequence of sociocultural and economic conditions, despite strong, evolutionarily conserved commonalities in
innate maternal responses (Hrdy 1999).
The relationship
between maternal responses and the evolution of conflictual interaction was confirmed in multiple regression analyses including both index and comparison groups.
Greater level of
maternal response was associated with fewer current diagnoses and symptoms in the children, and a maternal response of at least 50 % was required to detect an improvement in the child.
Maternal response was classified in 1 of 5 levels, based on the percent reduction in baseline HRSD scores: < 0 % (12 mothers), 0 % to 24 % (16 mothers), 25 % to 49 % (33 mothers), and 50 % to 74 % (27 mothers), 75 % to 100 % (26 mothers).
A child's daily TV - viewing time was obtained from
the maternal response to 2 questions on the survey that were adapted from those used in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.24 The 2 questions on our survey were as follows: (1) «Think for a moment about a typical weekday for your family in the last month.
Conditional and Base - Rate Probabilities of
Maternal Responses to Child Behaviors by Health Status