The Baby Care Questionnaire: a measure of parenting principles and practices during infancy

Alice Winstanley, Merideth Gattis, Alice Winstanley, Merideth Gattis

Abstract

The current report provides a new framework to explore the role of parenting practices and principles during infancy. We identify structure and attunement as key parenting principles during infancy. Structure represents reliance on regularity and routines in daily life. Attunement represents reliance on infant cues and close physical contact. We suggest parents' relative endorsement of these parenting principles is related to their choices about practices such as feeding, holding and night-time sleeping. We designed the Baby Care Questionnaire to measure parents' endorsement of structure and attunement, as well as their daily parenting practices. We report data demonstrating the factor structure, reliability and validity of the BCQ. The BCQ, to our knowledge, is the first comprehensive measure of parenting practices and principles during infancy. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for the measure.

Keywords: Attunement; Bed-sharing; Breastfeeding; Infancy; Infant crying; Parenting; Structure.

Copyright © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Scree plot depicting Eigenvalue against component number for real and random (PA) data.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Interaction between structure and attunement in predicting average duration of crying (with natural log transformation).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/3878760/bin/fx1.jpg

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