Abstract
Micro-analytic research on intuitive parenting behaviors has shed light on the temporal dynamics of parent and child interactions. Observations have shown that parents possess remarkable implicit communicative abilities allowing them to adapt to the clues infants give and therefore stimulate the development of many of the infants’ abilities, such as communication skills. This work focused on observing intuitive parenting behaviors that were synchronized and coordinated between the parents. We call them “prenatal intuitive coparenting behaviors” and used an observation task – the Prenatal Lausanne Trilogue Play procedure – to observe them. For this task, the parents role-play their first encounter with their future baby, represented by a doll. Two cases from a study on pregnancy after assisted reproductive technology are provided to illustrate how these behaviors manifest themselves. The observations from the first case suggest that expectant parents can offer the baby a coparental framework, whereas the observations from the second case show that opportunities for episodes of prenatal intuitive coparenting can be missed due to certain relationship dynamics. These kinds of observations deepen our knowledge of the prenatal emergence of the coparenting relationship and allow us to hone our strategies for intervening during pregnancy with couples who experience coparenting difficulties. Furthermore, these observations provide a novel and complementary perspective on prenatal intuitive parenting and coparenting behaviors.
Highlights
Coparenting relates to the various ways parents coordinate with each other in childrearing (McHale and Lindahl, 2011)
We explore the intuitive nature of coparenting behaviors at the prenatal stage in greater depth
As we propose to refer to them, consist of the subtle coordination between future parents when addressing their child
Summary
Coparenting relates to the various ways parents coordinate with each other in childrearing (McHale and Lindahl, 2011). The prenatal coparenting alliance was assessed around the fifth month of pregnancy using the Prenatal Lausanne Trilogue Play procedure (Carneiro et al, 2006) in order to identify associations with the postnatal father, mother and baby alliance at different stages. They imitated the hand, mouth, arm, and tongue movements, which the authors – Ammaniti et al (2014) – interpreted as favoring the affiliation process between the parents and child The results of these studies on prenatal intuitive parenting document how parents activate specific behaviors during these observational procedures that may be precursors of their earliest communicational competencies with their future child. The episode starts when the father starts moving toward his partner and stops when he starts moving back
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