Prenatal Coparenting Under High Arousal Predicts Infants' Cognitive Development at 18 Months

Contemporary research is led by an increasing appreciation that children's development must be studied within family contexts, and especially in relationship to the coparenting system. One significant aspect determining the quality of coparenting is parents' ability to communicate and work well together under high arousal and stress. Prenatal coparenting quality has been shown to predict postnatal coparenting, although has almost exclusively been observed under conditions that do not fully challenge parents. In this chapter, we introduce a novel procedure -the Inconsolable Doll Task (IDT) -to assess prenatal coparenting under stressful conditions using a nonresponsive doll simulator. Our findings with pregnant couples from Israel demonstrate the ecological validity of this new task and show that couples' coparenting while interacting with an inconsolable "infant" was associated with their pre-and postnatal coparenting under low arousal. Moreover, parents' negative, but not their positive, dynamics during the IDT predicted infants' cognitive development at 18 months, even after controlling for variance explained by pre-and postnatal parent-reported and parent-observed coparenting under low-arousal conditions, as well as for variance explained by infant temperament, parental education, and SES. The Findings underscore the importance of considering both negative and positive coparental dynamics observed under high and low-arousal conditions.