| Recent interest in identifying parental beliefs about development stems from an awareness that parent-child relations cannot be understood when parents' knowledge, values, and perceptions are overlooked. Particularly in the field of infancy, parental beliefs about early development have received little attention.; The first goal of this study was to devise an instrument that would provide a profile of beliefs about infant development in three domains: biological components of development, environmental influences, and parenting practices. The second goal was to examine the variation in the beliefs mothers, fathers, and experts in infancy have about infant development and to determine if variation in the experiences of parenthood might be related to differences in parental belief systems.; One hundred and five experts in infancy and two hundred and fifty-five first time parents of infants (one hundred forty-eight mothers and one hundred and seven fathers) participated in this study. Subjects were given the Infant Development Questionnaire. This measure asked parents and experts to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with seventy statements about infant development drawn from three conceptual domains (biological, environmental, and parenting practices). Information about the experience of parenthood was obtained from parents to determine the influence of these variables on parental beliefs. Variables included infant age and gender, maternal work status, paternal responsibility for childcare, and use of expert and informal advice about child development.; Using expert data, the first goal, constructing a self-report measure that provides a profile of beliefs about infant development, was achieved for two of three domains of interest: biological components of development and environmental components of development. Disagreement among experts about parenting practices resulted in this domain not reaching an acceptable level of reliability to justify its use for measuring the construct.; The results demonstrated clear differences among experts, mothers, and fathers in their beliefs about infants and their development. Mothers, fathers, and experts were significantly different in their knowledge about biological aspects of development. For the environmental domain, mothers and experts were similar in their beliefs and different from fathers. Mothers appear to serve as the mediator between fathers and experts in their beliefs about infant capabilities and the important environmental influences in an infant's development. Gender of infant and use of expert and informal advice were found to be related to variation in mothers' and fathers' beliefs. There were no effects due to age of infant, maternal work status, or paternal responsibility for childcare. This study begins the process of exploring the dynamic interaction among parental beliefs, behaviors, and child outcomes. |
