The Development Of The Parental Cohesion Scale And Its Mechanism Of Action On Children's Behavioral Problems

Mind-mindedness(MM)is defined as a caregiver's tendency to treat her infant as an individual with a mind.It refers to caregiver's ability to comment accurately on their infants' mental states including their thoughts and feelings during interaction in the first year of life or focus more on children's attributes that were mental rather than physical or behavioral in response to an invitation to describe the older children.Although mind-mindedness is important in establishing a harmonious parent-child relationship and promoting the healthy growth of children,research investigating this structure is scarce.We aimed to(a)develop a measure for assessing mind-mindedness in parents of school-age children,the Parents' Mind-mindedness Scale(PMS),(b)examine its psychometric properties,(c)explore the mechanism of mindmindedness on children's behavioral problems and(d)explore the role of children's emotion regulation and children's temperament in this moderated mediation model.Study 1 was conducted on 2413 parents of school-age children in Guangzhou.1019 samples were selected to conduct exploratory factor analysis and 1394 samples were selected to conduct confirmatory factor analysis and internal consistency reliability test.24 from the pretest samples retested after 2 weeks to conduct test-retest reliability test and 39 described their children in a written way to conduct criterion-related validity test.Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin(KMO)measure of sampling adequacy is 0.960 and a significant result on Bartlett's test of Sphericity ?2=15732.438(p<0.001,df=435).Exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that 23 items yielded three factor and confirmatory factor analysis found that the three-dimensional model fit well(?2/df=3.844,TLI=0.959,CFI=0.971,SRMR=0.030,RMSEA=0.045).Factor loadings ranged from 0.41 to 0.81.Cronbach alpha internal consistency coefficient was found as 0.939 for whole scale,0.904 for mental attributes,0.794 for physical attributes and 0.906 for general attributes.In the concurrent validity significant relationships(r=0.463)were found between Parents' Mind-mindedness Scale and the coding score.Test-retest reliability coefficient was 0.575 for whole scale.Overall results indicated that Parents' Mind-mindedness Scale can be named as a valid and reliable instrument that could be used as a tool for measuring parents' mind-mindedness.To investigate the effect of mind-mindedness on children's behavioral problems and the mechanism of the effect,865 parents of school-age children in Guangzhou were recruited in study 2.Results showed that mind-mindedness affected children's behavior problems by affecting children's emotion regulation: on the one hand,it reduced children's behavior problems by controlling emotional irregulation,on the other hand,it increased by stimulating emotionality,which accounts for a suppression effect between mind-mindedness and children's behavioral problems.And the second half of the mediating path was moderated by children's negative emotion,that is,children with lower negative emotion can buffer associations between emotional irregulation and behavior problems,however,children with higher negative emotion couldn't escape from the negative impacts.Informing parents about the encourage of children's reasonable emotion regulation may be a cost-effective,simple strategy to support at-risk children's social-emotional development and reduce behavior problems.