Training in social competence: the effect on mothers, fathers, and infants

The effects of a parent-training program designed to increase parental competence to assess, predict, elicit, and contingently, respond to infant behavior and to increase the infant's contingent responses to the parents' behavior were assessed. 19 parent couples and their 4-12-month-old infants were randomly assigned to the training group or the control group. Raters, unaware of the status of the parents, observed and rated the parents' behavior during a 2-hour home observation. Separate raters, unaware of the hypothesis, then rated a 20-min videotape of the parent-infant interactions in the home. Parents independently completed a questionnaire. Training was found to increase both the parents' and the infants' competence in the parent-infant dyad. Most important, a reciprocal relationship between increases in the trained fathers' interactions and decreases in the trained mothers' interactions was found, indicating that the triad may be the crucial unit for studies of parental competence.