Cold comfort: Warmth and hostility in mothers’ relationships with their infants and children’s later psychosocial adaptation

Abstract

This study investigated the association between the warmth and hostility mothers display in their relationship with their infants and children’s later psychosocial adaptation, over and above the influences of concurrent parenting. It also explored the role of a possible moderator: an irritable/reactive infant temperament. Data were drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Participants were (N = 4,386) nationally representative mother-child pairs for whom relevant data were available when the child was aged 0-1 years and 4-5 years. Measures of parenting and temperament as well as children’s pro-sociality and emotional and behavioural problems were obtained by maternal self-report. It was found that maternal warmth and hostility were additively, but not interactively, related to children’s outcomes. However, when concurrent maternal warmth and hostility were taken into account, there was no longer a meaningful relationship between parenting in infancy and children’s outcomes. Finally, infant temperament was not found to moderate the relationships between the parenting dimensions in infancy and children’s later outcomes. The results suggest that there may not be an enduring legacy of maternal warmth and hostility in infancy into early childhood but that the relationship between concurrent parenting and children’s outcomes may be more important.