Parental stress, attachment and maternal reflective functioning and the effects of a psychoeducational program among mothers of preschoolers in vulnerable contexts
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2017
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Abstract
The ability of mothers of thinking about their children’s thoughts and emotions are essential for present and future mental health -especially for young children- so it is necessary to understand the factors that may have an effect in this ability, as well as creating programs to promote maternal mentalizing. However, there are few studies reported in Latin America with mothers of preschoolers. This work includes two studies, the purpose of the first one is to explore the moderating role of parental stress and depression in the relationship of maternal reflective functioning and attachment in a sample of 125 mothers of children between 3 and 5 years old in public preschools in Santiago, Chile. Multiple linear regressions show that parenting stress but not symptoms of depression has a moderating role in the relationship between attachment style and maternal mentalizing, so mothers with similar attachment anxiety present lower scores in parental reflective functioning -highest score on prementalizing scale- as maternal stress increases. Also, mothers who have low attachment anxiety but high parenting stress will have a diminished mentalizing capacity as the parenting stress gets higher. The second study assesses the outcome of a five-session intervention program to enhance maternal mentalizing in 19 preschooler’s mothers compared with 26 mothers which were not exposed to any intervention. A Wilcoxon rank test revealed that mothers who attend to the intervention had significant differences in the number of cognitive words and no metal state words when reading a story to their children. Also, decreased their attachment anxiety, contrary to mothers in the control group.
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Tesis (Ph.D. in Psychotherapy)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2017