Keri Weed

Adolescent Parenting and Attachment During Infancy and Early Childhood

Objective. Prenatal parenting attitudes and parenting behaviors during infancy and early childhood were used as predictors of attachment in children of adolescent mothers at ages 1 and 5. Design. Seventy-eight adolescent mother - child dyads participated. Data were collected at five time points from the third trimester of pregnancy through the childrens 5th year. Results. A high percentage of children exhibited disorganized and insecure attachment during both infancy and early childhood; only 30% were securely attached at 1 year and 41% at 5 years. Quality of maternal interactions and cognitive readiness to parent predicted attachment stability; however, only verbal encouragement-stimulation predicted the transition from insecure to secure attachment. Prenatal cognitive readiness to parent independently predicted attachment security at 1 year and accounted for the relation between early maternal interactions and 1-year attachment. Maternal interactions during infancy but not early childhood, predicted 5-year attachment security. Conclusions. Early parenting had a unique and persistent effect on attachment security. However, verbal stimulation during early childhood attenuated the effects of early maternal unresponsiveness on attachment security at age 5.

Delineating Functional Competencies: A Component Model

This article describes a model for representing functional competencies in students with disabilities. Although strategies exist to identify skills and activities that are functional for students with severe handicaps, these strategies provide relatively little information on how to separate the functional skills into meaningful component parts that represent the range of behaviors needed in the natural environment. Data are presented to illustrate the narrow range of behaviors included in task analyses in current literature on skill acquisition. The Component Model of Functional Life Routines provides a systematic alternate approach to delineating the behaviors required in natural environments.

Predictors of Resiliency in Adolescent Mothers

The adaptation of adolescent mothers to challenges encountered by early childbearing is characterized by much diversity. The focus of the current research was to identify protective factors at the time of the initial pregnancy that predispose the young mother to resiliency. These factors were used as predictor variables in a stepwise discriminatory model to categorize 103 early childbearers as resilient or vulnerable 5 years after the birth of their first child. Six variables accounted for 46% of the variance between the resilient and vulnerable mothers. Resilient adolescents had completed more schooling at the time of the pregnancy, were relatively younger, had more support from friends and siblings, more empathic parenting attitudes, and somewhat lower verbal intelligence scores than their vulnerable counterparts. The linear discriminant function based on these six variables was then applied to an independent sample of 26 adolescent mothers. The function correctly classified 67% of the vulnerable mothers and 92% of the resilient mothers. Implications for more focused interventions with pregnant adolescents are discussed.

Precursors of Mild Mental Retardation in Children with Adolescent Mothers

Publisher Summary This chapter presents data that focuses on development during middle childhood for children born to adolescent mothers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A prospective analysis of childrens development enabled to understand the effects of early parenting, in combination with other maternal personal, social, and emotional factors, on the emergence of mental retardation and other developmental delays. The chapter briefly describes the Notre Dame Adolescent Parenting Project and then summarizes major developmental patterns through age 5. It presents maternal and child data related to the emergence of “early signs” of mild mental retardation and learning disabilities, tracing childrens developmental trajectories for intelligence, language, adaptive behaviors, and adjustment for the entire sample as well as for children who at age 10 showed delays in intelligence and adaptation. The chapter also presents data on the role of parenting in helping to explain developmental delays, emphasizing new findings on the interrelationships between maternal and child developmental trajectories. In the concluding part of the chapter, three interrelated explanations are offered regarding factors that might influence childrens developmental delays: disorganized attachment, failures to teach and model self-regulation skills, and neglectful-abusive parenting.

Teen Pregnancy and Parenting : Rethinking the Myths and Misperceptions

Adolescence is a transitional period from being a child to being an adult. The pregnant adolescent has special psychosocial needs. The pregnancy pushes her into womanhood when she is still in many ways a child, with many conflicting needs and wants. She will need to care for a dependent infant while still having needs and interests of other girls her age. She may have had little experience in independent problem solving and making important decisions. She probably lives and thinks in the present and often lacks the ability to plan for the future. She probably is greatly influenced by what her friends do and say and resistant to the advice of adults.

Symptoms of Depression Depend on Rigid Parenting Attitudes, Gender, and Race in an At-Risk Sample of Early Adolescents

Trajectories of depressive symptoms were compared between European American and African American boys and girls from ages 8 to 14 in a longitudinal sample of 130 children born to adolescent mothers. Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to analyze individual and group differences in level of depressive symptoms and their changes over time. Time-varying predictors included rigid parenting attitudes, maternal depression, and maternal educational attainment. African American boys reported more symptoms of depression at age 8 than African American girls or European American boys or girls. Symptoms of depression increased over time only for European American girls. Rigid parenting attitudes, but not maternal depression or maternal educational attainment, were associated with children’s depressive symptoms. Results substantiate the importance of differentiating groups by gender and race in conceptual models of depression.

Associations between nicotine dependence, anhedonia, urgency and smoking motives

Models of nicotine dependence have suggested that the association between urgency, a subconstruct of impulsivity, and smoking behaviors may be mediated by motivations. Motives that are driven by expectations that smoking will relieve negative affect or increase positive affect may be especially salient in persons who have depression symptoms such as anhedonia. Support for associations between symptoms of depression, urgency, and addiction has been found for alcohol dependence, but empirical analysis is lacking for an interactive effect of urgency and depression symptoms on nicotine dependence. The current study investigated relationships among the urgency facet of impulsivity, anhedonia, smoking motives, and nicotine dependence with secondary analyses of a sample of 1084 daily smokers using simultaneous moderation and multiple mediation analyses. The moderation analysis revealed that although urgency was significantly associated with smoking at average or higher levels of anhedonia, it was unrelated to smoking when few anhedonia symptoms were endorsed. Further, multiple mediation analyses revealed that the smoking motives of craving, cue exposure, positive reinforcement, and tolerance significantly mediated the relationship between urgency and nicotine dependence. Results suggest that models of alcohol addiction that include an interactive effect of urgency and certain symptoms of depression may be applied to nicotine dependence. Examination of the multiple mediational pathways between urgency and nicotine dependence suggests directions for intervention efforts.