This application examines the role of maternal cognition (i.e. conceptual complexity) in predicting specific components of parenting that promote self-regulation in young children. There have been calls among parenting researchers to define parental sensitivity, as global ratings sensitivity do not inform the specific behaviors that may be most relevant to predicting child outcomes, such as child self-regulation. To guide parenting interventions, however, we need specification of the actual behaviors that responsive, flexible parents use to promote child self-regulation. Such behaviors are particularly important to understand given a) the importance of self-regulation in child mental health and b) the importance of parental input in child self-regulation development. Conceptual complexity may be a point of entry in clinical intervention as complexity of thought is considered necessary to change the content of parental thought about the child, and subsequently parental behavior. ? ? It is hypothesized that maternal contingent and flexible responsiveness are key components of maternal sensitivity. The project examines these components in detail, focusing on mothers' strategic use of language, emotion, and movement to harness child attention in the service of self-regulation. Using sequential analyses of maternal strategy in the context of child behavior, it is predicted that particular patterns of maternal-child sequences will relate to independent maternal sensitivity ratings. Second, the project examines maternal cognition in a manner that will predict these behavioral components of sensitive parenting. That is, I predict that maternal conceptual complexity, the sophistication of the mother's knowledge about her child, will predict a mother's capacity to incorporate child cues in adjusting her behavior toward the child, allowing her to respond in contingent and flexible ways. ? ? The relations between maternal conceptual complexity and behaviors will be examined when children are 18 and 24 months old, in the context of a wait and reading task, and within a rural economically strained sample (N = 124). Children's burgeoning attentional and self-regulation abilities during this time make understanding the role of parenting in this development has great clinical significance. Children's attentional ability has implications for a variety of outcomes including self-regulation, social competence, and school readiness. Further, examining maternal behavior in the context of a reading task will inform research on emergent literacy. Finally, examining parenting within this understudied population will increase knowledge about characteristics of parent-child interactions that promote learning and development in diverse settings. ? ? ?
