CULTURAL MODELS OF INFANT EMOTIONS AND NEEDS AMONG THE GAMO PEOPLE OF SOUTHERN ETHIOPIA

How mothers perceive their infants’ emotions and their subsequent responses are influenced by cultural values and beliefs. Mothers who live in particularly harsh environments may have perceptions about their infants’ emotions that reflect not only cultural values but also constraints of the environment. In this qualitative study, 29 Gamo mothers living in rural Ethiopia were interviewed about perceptions of their infants’ emotions, how they felt about these emotions, and what they believed their infants needed in response. Through constant comparative analysis and thematic coding, several patterns emerged in mothers’ perceptions about their infants’ emotions and what constituted appropriate responses. Mothers said that their infants’ negative emotions were possibly related to illness and that appropriate responses were focused mostly on breastfeeding, complementary food, and needing to be held. Mothers also discussed their work demands and how they conflicted with their desire to respond to their infants; however, many mothers said that they relied on their older children to help. Mothers’ responses were centered on a parenting strategy aimed at promoting infant health and survival, which is consistent with research on parents living in rural environments who subsist by farming and have relatively high risk for infant mortality.     

Adverse caregiving in early life: The trauma and deprivation distinction in young children

Knowledge and understanding about the impact of cumulative adverse experiences on the health and wellbeing of children, adolescents, and adults has rapidly expanded over the past 30 years. Despite the invaluable attention and support this proliferation has drawn to the importance of early childhood experiences, we believe that it is time to move beyond broad indices of risk and toward more specific and individualized understanding of how risk exposures are linked to clinical outcomes in young children. Within infant and early childhood mental health, there is a need for greater specificity in linking adverse caregiving experiences in early life to psychopathology in children. We highlight a framework distinguishing experiences of trauma from experiences of deprivation and use the examples of posttraumatic stress disorder and reactive attachment disorder to demonstrate how greater specificity in our understanding of early adverse caregiving can lead to more accurate and targeted diagnosis and treatment for young children. Both researchers and clinicians benefit from an approach to gain a greater appreciation of the links between specific types of experiences and outcomes in the children that we serve.     

Beyond Acculturation: An Investigation of the Relationship of Familism and Parenting to Behavior Problems in Hispanic Youth

In the adolescent research literature, acculturation processes have been linked to the development of serious behavior problems in Hispanic adolescents, but not enough is known about how that process takes place. This article reports an investigation that sought to shed light on empirically plausible mechanisms by which family processes (i.e., familism and parenting practices) may operate as mediators of acculturation‐related factors on adolescent problem behaviors among 167 Hispanic sixth‐ or seventh‐grade early adolescents. SEM analyses identified an empirically plausible mediated pathway through which parenting practices may operate as a mediator of the effects of acculturation‐related variables on adolescent problem behaviors. Second, although the role of familism as a mediator was not supported, the results did provide support for familism having indirect effects on behavior problems also through parenting practices. The findings are discussed in the context of existing research and clinical developments in the treatment of Hispanic adolescents and families.