Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Parenting behaviors and decisions play an important role in determining children’s early environment. Are these behaviors driven by an intuitive theory of parenting – a coherent set of beliefs about child development and parent-child relationships? We asked participants to endorse a set of propositions about parenting and conducted exploratory factor analyses of their responses. Three distinct factors appeared in responses: an Affection and Attachment factor, an Early Learning factor, and a Rules and Respect factor. In an iterative process, we created a scale of items with subscales designed to measure these factors, which we call the Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (EPAQ). We conducted a series of studies to estimate the validity of the new scale, asking whether the predicted factor structure emerged from subsequent confirmatory factor analysis on a new sample, whether agreement with each subscale varied based on demographic factors, whether intuitive theories predicted self-reported parenting behaviors, and whether theories predicted memory for new theory-consistent information. The present scale provides an instrument to assess attitudes about parenting and child development, facilitating investigation and intervention on parenting behaviors.