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16.6.1: Mind-Mindedness

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    197621
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    Parents’ ability to represent and hold in mind the internal states of their infants – predicts how well babies can manage their own emotions

    Children depend hugely on their parents' ability to help them manage their emotions early on. Mind-mindedness is assessed by observing whether parents respond appropriately or inappropriately to their child’s emotions during free-play interactions. A key question is how a parent naming of different emotions the child experiences, enabling the child to recognize and manage them better. For example, when a child becomes overstimulated in a game–turning away from the caregiver, tuning out, or having frantic moments – a mind-minded parent accurately understands the signal and responds appropriately by pausing the game and enabling the child to recover. When such responses are repeated many times, children learn how to manage their emotions from their parents.

    Definition: Mind-Mindedness

     

    Mind-mindedness refers to the tendency of caregivers to treat their infants and toddlers as individuals with minds of their own, capable of thoughts, feelings, and intentions. This concept highlights the importance of recognizing and responding appropriately to the child's mental states and emotional needs. It suggests that caregivers who consistently and accurately interpret and respond to their child’s mental and emotional cues contribute positively to the child’s emotional and social development. This attunement helps the child develop a secure attachment, better emotion regulation, and enhanced social understanding.

    Meins, E. (1997). Security of attachment and the social development of cognition. Hove, England: Psychology Press.

    Earlier research has found that mind-mindedness is linked to secure parent-child attachment, which is linked to children’s ability to depend on parents’ responding appropriately to emotional cues. So, for example, if a child becomes angry or fearful, this emotion becomes associated with a parent’s helpful response. The child can learn to trust that arousal with the parent present will not lead to disruption that goes beyond their ability to cope.

    Researchers found that mind-mindedness in mothers and fathers is linked to improved emotion regulation in 12-month-old babies. But they also found differences between mothers and fathers in how mind-mindedness influences children.

    For mothers, stronger mind-mindedness when the baby was 4 months old predicted more positive high-frequency heart rate variation (HRV) in the baby at 12 months (higher baseline, more decline in a situation with a stranger). There was no such link for fathers, but there was a link between a father’s mind-mindedness later, at 12 months, and HRV at 12 months. This may reflect that mothers tend to be more involved in caring for infants earlier, so the mother’s influence displays itself earlier, on average.

    The researchers found that the baby’s heart rate variation at four months did not predict a parent’s mind-mindedness at 12 months. Judging by other research, the child’s temperament would be expected to influence parenting. Still, perhaps in the case of a child’s ability to regulate emotions, this influence takes more than one year to exhibit itself.

    The researchers found that measures of mind-mindedness and parenting quality at 12 months correlated for fathers but not mothers. They could not explain this finding; they suggest the problem might be the relatively coarse measure of parenting quality used in the research.

    Duncan, F. (2022, November 24). Mind-mindedness predicts how well babies can manage their emotions. Child and Family Blog. https://childandfamilyblog.com/mind-...baby-emotions/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


    16.6.1: Mind-Mindedness is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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