The role of experience in parenting beliefs of British and Italian women during pregnancy

Mascheroni, Eleonora, Grassi, Maria, Bonanomi, Andrea, Sperotto, Rebecca, Deeg, Sita, Hung, San, Xia, Ruixue, Ionio, Chiara, Au, Terry Kit-fong and Gattis, Merideth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8665-7577 2022. The role of experience in parenting beliefs of British and Italian women during pregnancy. Infant Mental Health Journal 43 (6) , pp. 835-848. 10.1002/imhj.22014

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (391kB) | Preview

Abstract

To understand the role of experience in parenting beliefs about caring for infants, we examined the parenting beliefs of pregnant women who were expecting their first child with those of pregnant women who already had at least one other child. A culturally diverse sample of 550 British and Italian women completed self-report measures evaluating their beliefs about the value of attunement and structure in caregiving, parenting self-efficacy, and home chaos. Psychometric evaluation confirmed the two-factor structure of the Baby Care Questionnaire (BCQ) for measuring attunement and structure but did not support configural invariance across the different samples. Beliefs about attunement and structure were related to parenting experience: pregnant women who already had at least one other child reported stronger beliefs in attunement, whereas pregnant women expecting their first child reported stronger beliefs in structure. Regression analyses revealed that the associations between parenting beliefs and experience remained when controlling for country, age, and education. Despite the limitations imposed by the lack of configural invariance, this cross-sectional, cross-cultural study constitutes an important first step in examining the relations between parenting experience and parenting beliefs during pregnancy.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Wiley-Blackwell
ISSN:	0163-9641
Funders:	ESRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 September 2022
Date of Acceptance:	30 August 2022
Last Modified:	13 Jun 2023 16:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/152645

Citation Data

Cited 1 time in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item