Investigation into meta-parenting

描述（由申请人提供）：

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Meta-parenting is defined as parental thoughts concerning the child-rearing domain that typically occur before or after parent-child interactions. Although some components of parental meta-cognition have been studied previously, meta-parenting, as a synthetic construct, has not. It is proposed that the construct is comprised of four components: anticipating, assessing, problem-solving, and reflecting. This two-year project has three goals: 1) to assess the occurrence and nature of meta-parenting in mothers and fathers; 2) to refine and investigate the psychometric properties of a new questionnaire designed to assess meta-parenting (The Meta-Parenting Profile Questionnaire, MPPQ); and 3) to test eight initial hypotheses about the construct. These hypotheses concern the determinants of meta-parenting (e.g., parental age and gender, education, stress) and one outcome--the quality of parent-child relationship. The proposed study consists of a cross-sectional investigation of meta-parenting in mothers and fathers of children aged 2 through 12. Participants will be 180 mothers and 90 fathers. The participants will be from three racial/ethnic groups: African-American, Mexican-American, and Euro-American. Mothers will fill out a series of questionnaires and then be interviewed. Three weeks later mothers will again complete the MPPQ. Fathers will also fill out the MPPQ. The proposed study will provide a rigorous initial test of the construct as well as lay the foundation for future investigations into this important but largely unrecognized aspect of parental social cognition. In turn, this construct should help investigators better understand parenting social cognition processes, child-rearing behavior, and the nature of effective parenting.