This paper reports the results of a study examining links between maternal representations of attachment, child attachment security, and mother and child narrative styles assessed in the context of reminiscences about shared experiences. Participants were 90 mother - child dyads. Child attachment security was assessed using the attachment Q-set and maternal attachment representations were measured using a recently designed instrument that assesses the script-like qualities of those representations. Analyses examined dependencies in the mother - child memory talk data and then assessed the overlap between both mother and child reminiscing styles and the attachment variables. Narrative styles of both the mothers and their children were coherent and consistent for each dyad member. Furthermore, maternal narrative style (e.g., specific and elaborative questions, using confirming evaluation comments) was significantly related to child participation in the narrative. Maternal and child attachment variables were positively and significantly correlated, and child security was positively associated with maternal narrative style. Maternal secure base scripts were also found to be significantly related to the number of references to emotions in both mother and child narratives as well as to children's overall participation in the memory talk. The pattern of results suggests that attachment representations serve as one influence on the manner(s) in which mother - child dyads think about and discuss emotion-laden content relevant to the child's personal autobiography. Furthermore, the results are consistent with the notion that the manner in which children organize their thoughts about emotion are (at least potentially) shaped by the narrative styles of their parents.

During recent years, fathers' involvement has been addressed as a key source of family well‐being and positive child development. However, the pathways to father involvement and its consequences for child development are varied, influenced by social, cultural, and ecological variables, and lack a systematic integration. This paper aims to bridge this gap by offering a systematic review of studies examining the psychosocial processes of father involvement during early childhood over the last 10 years. A database search was performed using a combination of relevant keywords, leading to identification of 3,655 articles, with 109 manuscripts assessed for eligibility, and finally 86 included. Most of the studies examine determinants of father involvement, with an emerging number of studies relying on the father's assessment and longitudinal designs. Nevertheless, the focus on White middle‐class families is dominant, leaving unexplored father involvement in other cultures and contexts. The findings are analyzed aiming to open new avenues for future research.

The secure-base phenomenon is central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth theory of attachment and is also central to the assessment of attachment across the lifespan. The present study tested whether mothers' knowledge about the secure-base phenomenon, as assessed using a recently designed wordlist prompt measure for eliciting attachment-relevant stories, would predict their children's securebase behavior, as assessed by observers in the home and summarized with the Attachment Q-set (AQS). In each of three sociocultural groups (from Colombia, Portugal, and the US), scores characterizing the quality of maternal secure-base narratives elicited using the word-list prompt procedure were internally consistent, as indicated by tests of cross-story reliability, and they were positively and significantly associated with the child's security score from the AQS for each subsample. The correlation in the combined sample was r(129) = .33, p < .001. Subsequent analyses with the combined sample evaluated the AQS item-correlates of the secure-base script score.These analyses showed that mothers whose stories indicate that they have access to and use a positive secure-base script in their story production have children who treat them as a “secure base” at home. These results suggest that a core feature of adult attachment models, in each of the three sociocultural groups studied, is access to a secure-base script. Additional results from the study indicate that cross-language translations of the maternal narratives can receive valid, reliable scores even when evaluated by non-native speakers.

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Early studies on fathers focused mainly on their presence in or absence from children's lives, and the amount of time they spent with them. More recently, several authors have stated the importance of understanding the quality of father involvement to comprehend fully its impact on child development. However, studies have also reported that socio-demographic variables, namely, father educational levels and employment status affect parenting and children outcomes. The aims of this study were to analyze a sample of 465 Portuguese two-parent families with pre-school age children, looking for associations between father involvement in care/socialization activities and paternal parenting styles while testing for the moderating effect of father educational levels and working hours. Fathers reported on their own parenting styles and mothers described the father's involvement. Fathers' working hours moderated the relation between his authoritative parenting style and involvement in teaching/discipline and play activities. In addition, fathers' education moderated the relation between his authoritative style and involvement in direct care and teaching/discipline. Given the different roles that fathers can assume in their children's lives, it is important to understand the mechanisms of paternal participation, and identify the factors which explain the differences in effective care so that we can promote higher positive involvement.

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The evolutionary rationale offered by Bowlby implies that secure base relationships are common in child-caregiver dyads and thus, child secure behavior observable across diverse social contexts and cultures. This study offers a test of the universality hypothesis. Trained observers in nine countries used the Attachment Q-set to describe the organization of children's behavior in naturalistic settings. Children (N = 547) were 10-72 months old. Child development experts (N = 81) from all countries provided definitions of optimal child secure base use. Findings indicate that children from all countries use their mother as a secure base. Children's organization of secure base behavior was modestly related to each other both within and across countries. Experts' descriptions of the optimally attached child were highly similar across cultures.The secure base phenomenon is at the core of Bowlby and Ainsworth's analysis of the infant-mother relationship. Ainsworth coined the term "secure base behavior" based on her naturalistic observations of infant-mother interactions in rural Uganda. When reviewing her field notes, she noticed that infants "do not always stay close to the mothers but rather make little excursions away from her, exploring other objects and interacting with other people, but returning to the mother from time to time" (Ainsworth, 1967, p. 345). The hallmark of secure base behavior is the seemingly purposeful balance between excursions or explorations away from the

Relations between fathers' and mothers' representations of attachment (independently assessed using an attachment script representation task) and children's secure base behavior (assessed using the Attachment Q-sort; AQS) were studied in 56 Portuguese families (mean age of child ¼ 31.9 months). Each parent's secure base script representation score predicted AQS security scores for the child with that parent at approximately equivalent degrees of association. However, both parental secure base script scores and AQS security scores were positively correlated across parents. A hierarchical regression predicting AQS security with father from both parent's scriptedness scores and from the AQS score with mother showed a unique, significant influence of father's scriptedness score and the AQS score with mother, but mother's scriptedness score did not uniquely add to the prediction. Difficult temperament was ruled out as a mediator of the cross-parent association for AQS security scores.