The Relationship Between Maternal Personality Functioning and Caregiving Quality

Previous studies have shown that mothers with categorically defined personality pathology experience substantial difficulties in parenting, but research using Level of Personality Functioning (LPF) is notably lacking. This study explored relationships between maternal LPF and behavioral (Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale), attitudinal (Parenting Sense of Competence scale), and representational (Caregiving Helplessness Questionnaire) measures of caregiving in a sample of 170 mothers. We also investigated whether LPF incrementally explains caregiving over anxiety and depression, the most common mental health factors examined in parenting research. As hypothesized, LPF was significantly associated with all caregiving measures. LPF incremented anxiety and depression in associations with supportive responses to children's emotions, parenting sense of competence, and disorganized caregiving representations, but not nonsupportive responses to children's emotions. These findings underscore the importance of considering LPF when evaluating mother and child risk and addressing relational processes linked to self and interpersonal functioning in parenting interventions.