Parental stress and reflective functioning: The associations with preschoolers’ social understanding

Understanding the other’s feelings and desires is an important component of the Theory of Mind (i.e., the capacity to explain and predict human behavior in terms of mental states; ToM; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Social understanding competence develops within sensitive and co-regulating interactions with caregivers (Midgley et al., 2017). Specifically, parental reflective functioning (PRF) and stress have an important role on children’s social understanding (Calvano et al., 2022; Symons & Clark, 2002). The aim of the present study was to test the moderating effect of PRF in the association between parenting stress and children’s social understanding. Participants were 305 children without any sensory, intellectual, or speech deficits from 24 to 72 months (146 girls; Mage = 48.2, SD= 13.9) and their parents (Mage = 37.3, SD= 6.3), which completed a series of online questionnaire: Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (Luyten et al., 2017; ωs = .72-.76), Parenting Stress Index (Abidin, 1995; Guarino et al., 2015; ω = .96), and Children Social Understanding Scale (Tahiroglu et al., 2014; ω = .91). Moderation regression analysis showed that, even if the interaction term between parenting stress and PRF was not significant, children’s social understanding was predicted by parent’s well-being (in terms of lower levels of stress), b = 0.002, p = .017, and parent’s interest and curiosity to the child’s mental states (high PRF), b = 0.07, p = .013. Overall, findings confirm that parents have a crucial role in the development of children’s social understanding. High level of parent’s stress and low reflective function could impact on children’s social-cognitive development during preschool age.