Faculty of Science Guest Seminar : How Do Culture and Risk Shape Parenting During Infancy?

 Name: Professor Merideth Gattis – Cardiff University

Chairperson: Dr Julien Mayor

Title: How Do Culture and Risk Shape Parenting During Infancy?

Abstract:

Despite the biological similarities of all infants, caregiving decisions about infants differ within and across cultures. We propose two key principles that guide caregiving decisions: structure and attunement. Structure refers to the utilisation of regularity and routines in infant care. Attunement refers to reading and responding to infant cues to guide decision making in infant care. We developed the Baby Care Questionnaire to measure these two parenting principles and to examine how structure and attunement are related to specific parenting practices (Winstanley & Gattis, 2013). I will present two recent studies using the Baby Care Questionnaire, one examining how risk shapes parenting by comparing parents of preterm and full term infants (Winstanley, Sperotto, Putnick, Cherian, Bornstein & Gattis, 2014), and the other examining how culture shapes parenting during infancy by comparing parenting in China and the United Kingdom (Gattis & Au, 2015). We hope that future studies will use the Baby Care Questionnaire to investigate the combined effects of culture and risk on parenting, as well as the effects of early parenting on children's social and cognitive outcomes.

Biosketch:

Merideth Gattis obtained her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. After a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich and a lectureship at Sheffield University, she joined Cardiff University, where she is currently Professor. She is currently on the Editorial Board of Psychological Science. Her research interests are in cognition and development, and include research with infants, children, and adults. Her research with Development@Cardiff seeks to move our understanding of cognition beyond the nature/nurture divide, asking detailed questions about how nature and nurture interact to produce thinking and reasoning. To answer these questions, she compares human behaviour across different environmental factors. Those environmental factors include parenting practices as well as the broader influence of culture and language.