Free-play and caregiving activity: analyze and intervention in mother-infant interaction

Abstract

Mother-infant attachment occurs in different situations. The present study aims to investigate if an intervention, from data of a situation of free-play interaction, increases the frequency of interactive behaviors in other situations, such as diapering. The sample will be consisted with 15 to 20 dyads of mothers and babies from three to four months of age. For this, the project will have three stages. The first one will be a filming of the interactive behaviors in the free-play and caregiving situations (diaper change). In the second stage an intervention will be made with the mother from the filming of the interaction in a play situation. In the third stage, the interactive behaviors will be filmed again in play and diaper changing. The data will be collected at the Clinical Applied Psychology (CPA) of UNESP campus Bauru-SP. Filming will be encoded using the CITMI-R protocol software. Filming of play interaction will be edited by separating episodes of appropriate maternal interactive behaviors and promoters of interactive child responses and noninteractive maternal behaviors. Such episodes will be used in the intervention. The first set will serve to reinforce appropriate maternal interactive behaviors, and the second set will target intervention with the mother, helping her to reflect on other forms of interaction that could be used to extend her interaction with the baby. Then will be filmed again episodes of free-play interaction and diapering. The shooting data in each situation will be coded, described and compared. From this procedure, it is expected that the interactive behavior of the mother and her baby will improve in both situations: free-play and diapering, that is, the generalization of the repertoire learned for other contexts of dyad attachmet.