Abstract The aim of the study was to investigate predictors of maternal well-being in mothers of twins. As well as being important in its own right, maternal well-being is a crucial predictor of parenting (Belsky in Child Dev. 55(1):83, 1984). Based on previous research (Pike et al. in Int J Beh Dev. 30(1):55–66, 2006) we expected that household chaos (Confusion, Hubbub, and Order) and child behavior problems would predict maternal depression, stress and anxiety. The data for the study was taken from the Twins, Family and Behavior Study (TFaB) -- a longitudinal UK study of twins born in 2009 and 2010. One hundred and fifty-eight mothers of twins (Mchild age= 6.01 years, SDage = 0.50) reported on household chaos, child disruptive behaviors and their own well-being. Higher levels of household chaos were linked to maternal depressive, anxiety and stress related symptoms. More child behavior problems were related to more depressive and stress symptoms but not anxiety. The findings show promise for future research investigating different types of maternal well-being and suggested practical implications, such as intervening on concrete aspects of household chaos to improve maternal well-being.
Children and adolescents living in residential child care often experience heightened developmental vulnerability arising not only from pre-placement adversity, but also from the relational and institutional conditions that shape everyday care (Barone et al., 2016; Beinum, 2008; Engel de Abreu et al., 2023). Although a substantial body of literature has examined risk and protective factors associated with psychological well-being in residential settings, this evidence remains fragmented across individual, relational, and contextual domains, with limited attention to how these dimensions interact (Giraldi et al., 2022). This paper offers a critical synthesis of the literature on well-being in residential child care, with the aim of rethinking prevailing variable-based approaches and advancing a more relational and ecologically grounded understanding of children’s developmental trajectories. Adopting a systematised narrative review design, the paper draws on studies published between 2000 and 2025 that address the psychological well-being of children and adolescents in residential care. The review examines key intrapersonal factors, including resilience, self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, coping, and cognitive functioning (Luthar et al., 2000; Cha & Nock, 2009; Bandura, 1997; Goleman, 1995), alongside contextual and relational dimensions such as caregiver-child attachment, peer relationships, sibling co-placement, family contact, placement duration, and the organisational quality of care settings (Costa et al., 2020; Perry & Price, 2018; McWey et al., 2010). Rather than treating these as discrete predictors, the paper analyses how they operate dynamically within systems of care, support, and institutional constraint. The review argues that well-being in residential child care cannot be adequately understood through isolated risk/protection frameworks alone. Instead, developmental outcomes are shaped by the interaction between children’s internal resources and the quality of the relational and ecological environments in which they live (Bronfenbrenner, 1994). In particular, stable and emotionally attuned relationships with caregivers, positive peer climates, and care environments informed by trauma-sensitive and developmentally responsive practices emerge as central protective conditions (Bath & Seita, 2018; Brunzell et al., 2019). At the same time, the review highlights major limitations in the field, including conceptual inconsistency, methodological heterogeneity, weak longitudinal evidence, and insufficient cross-cultural analysis (Ainsworth & Thoburn, 2014). The paper contributes to the literature by advancing a relational-ecological framework for understanding well-being in residential child care and by identifying priorities for future research, policy, and practice. It argues for a shift from deficit-oriented and static models towards a more integrated understanding of care as a developmental, relational, and ethically significant environment.
This study examined effortful control and its relations to personality, parenting and well-being in a community sample of Russian preschool children (N = 365, 46% girls) using parent-reported effortful control scale from the very short form of the children's behaviour questionnaire, the inventory of child individual differences-short version, the Alabama parenting questionnaire-preschool revision, the self-reporting questionnaire, and parent and teacher reports on the strengths and difficulties questionnaire. The findings confirmed the four-factor structure of effortful control, including inhibitory control, attentional control, low-intensity pleasure and perceptual sensitivity. Girls demonstrated higher scores than boys on effortful control, perceptual sensitivity, inhibitory control and low-intensity pleasure. Older children scored higher than younger on inhibitory control and perceptual sensitivity and lower on low-intensity pleasure. Gender and age accounted for less than 3% of the variance in effortful control. Effortful control was associated with personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness, and with positive emotions and low-negative affect. Higher effortful control was associated with higher levels of prosocial behaviour and lower levels of externalising and internalising problems. Structural modelling showed that the effect of parenting on child prosocial and problem behaviours may be mediated by effortful control.
Helena R. Slobodskaya, Evgeniya N. Petrenko, Svetlana V. Loginova et al.
Requests for life-prolonging treatments can cause irresolvable conflicts between health-care providers and surrogates. The Multiorganization Policy Statement (Bosslet et al. 2015) with recommendations to prevent and manage these conflicts creates a good opportunity to examine how end-of-life decisions are made in Dutch neonatal intensive care units and how medical futility is defined. The Dutch equivalent of medical futility in the context of NICU care has grown and developed rather independently, within the typical legal, ethical, and cultural framework of Dutch society. Moreover, intractable conflicts and legal claims about life-prolonging treatments of newborns are very rare. This makes the Multiorganization Statement recommendations only partly relevant to Dutch practice. Critics are right in their comments that a substitution for the term futility, as recommended in the statement, is unlikely to prevent or solve irresolvable conflicts. But the recommended transparency about limit setting may work well, provided physicians make sure that comfort and palliative care are always provided.
Determining the content of the right to proper parental nurturing of children under the age of 14 within the framework of determining the procedure for its implementation and improving the effectiveness of legal regulation of relevant legal relations is an urgent scientific task. The solution to this problem is possible by defining the essence of the relevant subjective right by identifying the needs to be met by parents within the relevant interpersonal impact on a child, and the opportunities to ensure that these needs are met. Based on this analysis, it is proposed to understand the content of the child's rights through a system of powers to recognize the owner of a comprehensive personal intangible asset that mediates the satisfaction of needs in its best interests, through parents to acquire them through parental influence, use their responsibilities to meet their respective needs and demand protection.Key words: best interests of the child, parental nurturing, basic and higher needs of the child, care and development.
I've increasingly felt that the correct answer to the question "Is depression nature or nurture?" is "yes."In a landmark study in this issue, Kendler and colleagues (1) put substance to this answer.While the answer may still be "yes," through the use of a cleverly designed natural experiment, Kendler et al. have identified a portion of nurture, the rearing environment, that can clearly be defined and even altered with intervention.In brief, they studied 666 high-risk full siblings, with high risk defined as having at least one parent with major depression, and 2,595 high-risk half siblings of which at least one was home-reared and one adopted away.What made this study possible were the large samples from a national registry in Sweden, the parental assessments, and the fact that in Sweden, where adoption is not common, adoptive families are selected to provide high-quality rearing environments, including high educational status, economic security, and a stable environment.It is impressive that this study comes from an investigator group that has done major genetic and twin studies.In both types of studies, the nature of the environment is unclear.Similarly, the adoption studies, another way of studying environmental effects, usually have had insufficient information on the biological parents and their clinical state.As the authors point out, biological parents of adoptees likely have a higher risk of psychopathology, less education, and higher divorce rates.Moreover, the environment in the adopted-away home has not been clearly defined in most studies.In fact, the authors previously carried out an extended adoption study in the same sample and had shown statistically that genetic factors and rearing experiences contributed to an approximately equal extent (2).Both forms of cross-generational transmission act additively on the risk for depression in the offspring.However, the contribution of the rearing environment was only shown statistically.These challenges in this and other previous reports must have led the authors to this study design.The findings confirmed the strong protective effect of a nurturing rearing environment on the child's well-being.However, this protective effect disappeared when an adoptive parent had major depression or the nurturing adoptive home was disrupted by parental death or divorce during the adoptee's childhood or adolescence.The results demonstrate the strong impact of the rearing environment on risk for major depression and support the importance of intervention efforts to improve the rearing environment in highrisk families.
The article investigates how nurturing touch practices, such as gentle brush massage, finger massage and body massage, are applied in 10 Danish toddlers’ early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Thirteen practitioners contributed to the study with written narratives on their experiences with nurturing touch practices and how they influenced their relationship with the children and the conditions for toddlers’ emotional well-being and learning at the nursery or family day care. This qualitative case study is built on a relational ontology and draws on Hundeide’s ([2007]. When empathic care is obstructed – excluding the child from the zone of intimacy. In S. Bråten (Ed.), On being moved from mirror neurons to empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) concept of a zone of intimacy. The practitioners describe how nurturing touch practices can enhance their sensitivity and the intersubjective space between them and the children. The practitioners also describe how toddlers seem to become more attentive to their bodies, more relaxed and flexible. The study invites policy-makers and practitioners to broaden their focus on children’s learning and to consider how the mutual relatedness between practitioner and child influence children’s bodily, non-verbal and emotional experiences and participation.
This paper considers critical approaches to child malnutrition and its broader causes, which necessarily include, but extend beyond, food. Materialist approaches to food in geography have emphasised how food is only one thing to move through, affect or be incorporated into children’s bodies alongside numerous other social and material relations. Drawing on (the untapped similarities in) wider geographies of infrastructure and care, as well as feminist perspectives on childhood, infant feeding and shame, this paper attempts to develop a broader geography of infrastructures of nurture: the underlying and contested relationships necessary to sustain life; and the consequences attached to their gaps and failings.
In the United Kingdom, the most common reasons for a child to come under the care of social services are neglect and abuse. Such early childhood adversity is a risk factor for social-isolation and poor mental health in adulthood. Touch is a key channel for nurturing interactions, and previous studies have shown links between early somatosensory input, experience dependent neural plasticity, and later life emotional functioning. The aim of the present study was to test the relationship between childhood neglect/abuse and later life experiences, attitudes, and hedonic ratings of affective touch. Here, affective touch is defined as low force, dynamic touch which C-Tactile afferents (CTs) respond optimally to. We hypothesized that a childhood lacking in early nurturing tactile stimulation would be associated with reduced sensitivity to socially relevant affective touch in adulthood. To test this, 19 care leavers (average 9.32 ± 3.70 years in foster care) and 32 non-care leavers were recruited through opportunity sampling (mean age = 21.25 ± 1.74 years). Participants completed a range of psychophysical somatosensory tests. First, they rated the pleasantness of CT-optimal (3 cm/s) and non-CT-optimal (0.3 and 30 cm/s) stroking touch applied to their forearm, both robotically and by an experimenter. They also made vicarious ratings of the anticipated pleasantness of social tactile interactions depicted in a series of videos. Finally, they filled in the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ). As expected, care leavers reported significantly higher levels of childhood trauma than the control group. They also reported significantly lower levels of positive childhood touch compared to non-care leavers, but their attitudes and experiences of current intimate and affiliative touch did not differ. Across all psychophysical tests, care leavers showed specific reduction in sensitivity to the affective value of CT targeted 3 cm/s touch. The results of this study support the hypothesis that a lack of nurturing touch in early developmental periods leads to blunted sensitivity to the specific social value of affective touch. Future research should investigate the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying the observed effect.
Shaunna L. Devine, Susannah C. Walker, Adarsh D. Makdani et al.
Purpose The NASCITA Study, a national-level, population-based, prospective cohort study, was set up to better understand the early health status of Italian children, comprising their physical, cognitive and psychological development, and how it is affected by social and health determinants, including nurturing care. NASCITA will also assess geographical differences and disparities in healthcare. Participants Participating family paediatricians from throughout Italy enrolled infants born during the enrolment period (April 2019–July 2020). The 5054 newborns seen by the 139 paediatricians for at least two visits, including the first well-child visit, and for whom parental consent was given, make up the baseline population. Findings to date Mothers had a mean age at delivery of 33.0 years and tended to have a high or medium level of education (42.5% university and 41.7% high school degrees) and to be employed (69.7%). One-third (36.1%) took folic acid supplementation appropriately, and 6.5% smoked or consumed alcohol (10.0%) during pregnancy. One-third (31.7%) of deliveries were caesarean deliveries. Concerning the newborns, 5.8% had a low birth weight and 6.2% were born prematurely. The majority (87.7%) slept in the supine position, and 63.6% were exclusively breast fed at 1 month, with a decreasing north to south prevalence (χ 2 t 52; p<0.001). Significant north–south differences were found in all areas, including parental education, behaviours in pregnancy and hospital practices. When compared with national level data, the cohort population’s distribution, maternal sociodemographic characteristics and newborn physical characteristics reflect those of the Italian population. Future plans Data will continue to be collected during the well-child visits until the children are 6 years old, and multiple health outcomes will be studied, spanning child development and illness, as well as potentially related factors including caregiving routines. The findings will be used to develop specific interventions to improve children’s health. Trial registration number NCT03894566 .
Chiara Pandolfini, Antonio Clavenna, Massimo Cartabia et al.
