Julie Wargo Aikins
Wayne State University, MI·Psychology
A strong bond between a mother and her infant supports a child's social, emotional and cognitive growth. It also protects against later behavioral and health problems.
- Fields
Psychology
- Topics
maternal representations
Working Model of the Child Interview
mother-infant relationship
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Test whether disrupted maternal representations of the child, measured with the Working Model of the Child Interview, stay stable from the third trimester of pregnancy to when the child is two years old, in 99 women living in high-risk settings.
- Examine whether demographic factors, exposure to maltreatment or intimate partner violence, depression, anxiety or PTSD symptoms, and parenting stress predict stability or change in mothers' views of their child.
- Relate stability or change in maternal representations to observed quality of maternal caregiving and to child adaptation, using longitudinal multi-method data.
More about the research
How a mother pictures her developing child, shaped partly by how she herself was cared for, appears to matter. "Disrupted" maternal representations involve mixed messages, blurred roles, extreme withdrawal and other unusual patterns of thinking about the child. These representations have been linked to poorer child emotional adjustment and to insecure or disorganized attachment. It is unknown whether such views, when they appear in pregnancy, stay stable over the child's first years, or how changes in them affect parenting and child outcomes.
Why it matters
Mental health difficulties appear in 7 to 24% of children before age two. By identifying which mother-child pairs are most at risk and why negative maternal views persist, this work could help design new prevention and intervention programs, or adjust existing ones. These programs would be aimed at mothers in high-risk settings and their young children.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Italo Lopez Garcia
University of Southern California, CA·Social Science
Measure whether gains from Msingi Bora, an 8-month group parenting program in rural Kenya, persist about five years later in children's cognitive, language, executive function and social-emotional skills, using a follow-up survey across 60 villages.
Katherine Nelson-Coffey
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Psychology
Track changes in loneliness and social connectedness among first-time expecting mothers and fathers from pregnancy through four months postpartum.
Rachel Lean
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether maternal mind-mindedness, a mother's attunement to her infant's mental states, predicts later parenting sensitivity, using prospective observations of mother-infant interactions from birth to age 3.
The school
Wayne State University: 21 labs on PI Pages, $292M a year on research, 194 research doctorates a year.
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