Is doing your homework associated with becoming more conscientious?

Research has shown that sustained homework effort enhances academic performance and that students’ conscientiousness is a powerful predictor of students’ homework effort. But does homework—as homework proponents claim—in turn also influence the development of conscientiousness over time? In the present study, we examined whether students’ homework effort in two subjects (i.e., mathematics and German) was associated with inter-individual differences in students’ development of conscientiousness in the early years of adolescence. Bivariate change models with a total of N = 2760 students revealed that homework effort and conscientiousness were systematically related over time (Grade 5 to Grade 8). Most importantly, students who invested more effort in their homework showed more positive development in conscientiousness.     

Parent Care in the Context of Women's Multiple Roles

This article addresses the multiple roles held by women involved in parent care and the ways in which these roles affect the women's well-being. Research on women's roles (including that of caregiver) has been guided by two opposing perspectives, the scarcity hypothesis and the expansion hypothesis. Findings from our studies of role quality, role combinations, and role spillover have provided abundant evidence that the lives of these women cannot be easilycaptured by either the scarcity or the expansion hypothesis alone.     

Parent – infant psychotherapy,the transition to parenthood and parental narcissism: Implications for treatment

In this article the author discusses some of the indications for short- or long-term parent?–?infant psychotherapeutic interventions in terms of what he defines as ‘problems of parenthood’ and ‘problems of parental narcissism’. Brief parent?–?infant psychotherapeutic interventions are most frequently indicated in the case of the former: more neurotic problems of parenthood where the parents present a manic or counter-depressive type of narcissism. Masochistic problems of parenthood are also susceptible to treatment through brief parent?–?infant interventions, although in such cases treatment may have to be continued in another modality of long-term psychotherapy. More dissociated problems of parental narcissism constitute a contraindication for brief psychotherapeutic parent?–?infant interventions. The persecutory narcissism of these parents contributes to a ‘negative pre-transference’ which creates a major resistance to the therapeutic process.     

Adolescents in Transition to Adulthood: Parental Support, Relationship Satisfaction, and Post-transition Adjustment

The transition from high school is a pivotal period for intergenerational relations, as the asymmetry characterizing pre-transition relations with parents is reconfigured. Changes in adolescent–parent relations across this transition have potentially important implications for post-transition adjustment. A prospective study was conducted with an ethnically diverse sample that included adolescents who were not college-bound. Maternal, but not paternal, relations improved across the transition from high school to adult life. Changes in support from both mothers and fathers were associated with changes in relationship satisfaction and changes in satisfaction predicted post-transition adjustment. The results verify the importance of parental support to the quality of relational bonds between young adults and their parents. They also affirm the significance of these bonds for post-transition adjustment.     

What Is the Buzz About Iconicity? How Iconicity in Caregiver Speech Supports Children's Word Learning

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free-play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty-four 1.5-2-year-olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English-Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free-play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word-referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word-referent mappings.     

Effects of massage intervention on discharged premature infants’ weight,parental stress,and parent–child attachment: A randomized controlled trial

Infant massage enhances the growth and development of premature infants and promotes parent–child bonding. However, its effects on parental stress and parent–child attachment in premature infants, as well as gender differences thereof, remain unclear. In this randomized controlled trial, we used a repeated-measures design and included 61 premature infants (mean gestational age: 35.1 ± 1.5 weeks). Weight, parental stress, and parent–child attachment were measured at multiple time points: before massage and 1, 4, 8, and 12 weeks after commencing infant massage. The results revealed that the massage group infants had significantly higher weight gain than the control (no massage) group infants at all four time points. Moreover, parents in the massage group reported notably lower levels of stress than those in the control group, particularly in the parental distress and difficult children subscales. No significant between-group differences were observed in parent–child attachment. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed between fathers and mothers in parental stress and parent–child attachment. However, fathers reported higher levels of distress than mothers at 4 and 12 weeks. In conclusion, infant massage led to increased infant weight and reduced parental stress over time, and differences between fathers and mothers were not significant, except fathers exhibiting higher levels of distress than mothers over time. Healthcare professionals should educate and support parents on infant massage before discharge of premature infants.