Parental insightfulness is associated with cooperative interactions in families with toddlers

A growing body of research has highlighted the importance of mother-father-child interactions in families with toddlers, but little is known about the internal processes underlying parenting in such interactions. Dyadic studies of parent-child relationships have focused on parental insightfulness as promoting sensitive parent-child interactions, and the goal of the present study was to examine whether insightfulness would similarly be associated with cooperative triadic interactions. To address this question, we observed 77 mother-father-toddler triads in the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) procedure to assess family cooperation, and the insightfulness of each parent was assessed using the Insightfulness Assessment, a video replay procedure in which parents are interviewed regarding their children's thoughts and feelings after watching short video clips of the children. The results showed that families in which both parents were insightful had higher Family Cooperation and Coparenting scores compared to families in which only 1 parent was insightful and families in which neither parent was insightful. The implications of these findings for research on the internal processes underlying parenting in a triadic context are discussed.