Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Mother-child and father-child "serve and return" interactions at 9 months: Associations with children's language skills at 18, 24, and 30 months(2023) Chen, Yu; Cabrera, Natasha J; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Infants learn language through the back-and-forth interactions with their parents where they “serve” by vocalizing, gesturing, or looking and parents “return” in a temporally and semantically contingent way. My dissertation focuses on these “serve and return” (SR) interactions between 9-month-old infants and their mothers and fathers (n = 296 parents and 148 infants) from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds by examining the variability in SR interactions explained by maternal and paternal psychological distress, the association between SR interactions and children’s language skills at 18, 24, and 30 months, and the moderation effect of maternal and paternal SR interactions on language outcomes. Psychological distress was indicated by parent-reported depressive symptoms, parenting stress, and role overload, and SR interactions were transcribed and coded from video-taped parent-child toy play activities during home visits. I report three major findings. First, neither maternal nor paternal psychological distress was significantly associated with and SR interactions at 9 months, controlling for demographic factors. Second, fathers who responded to their child’s serves more promptly and mothers who provided more semantically relevant responses had children with higher receptive and expressive language skills, respectively, at 18 and 30 months. Third, fathers’ semantically relevant responses were negatively associated with children’s receptive language skills at 24 months; however, this main effect was moderated by mothers’ semantically relevant responses. Understanding how mothers and fathers engage in temporally and semantically contingent social interactions with their children during the first year, especially among families from diverse backgrounds, would enable programs and policies to more effectively promote early language development and reduce gaps in school readiness.Item THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH EFFECTS OF ADULT CHILDREN ON FATHERS: A LONGITUDINAL STRUCTURAL EQUATION ANALYSIS(2019) Blick, Ryan; Anderson, Elaine; Roy, Kevin; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Men are entering the later stages of life at an unprecedented rate. As fathers and their children age, a gradual transition in the hierarchy of their relationship occurs, eventually resulting in fathers being recipients, rather than providers, of care. Unfortunately, little is known about the effect that adult children (children ages 19 years old and above) have on fathers’ physical and mental health in the middle-to-late stages of life. Using a sample of 588 fathers who were between the ages of 50- and 80-years-old and who had at least one adult child, a series of structural equation models using a cross-lagged panel design were conducted to increase our understanding of 1) the nature of the associations among fathers’ physical health, mental health, relationship quality with their spouse, and relationship quality with their adult children over time in middle-to-late adulthood, and 2) how these associations change as fathers age in middle-to-late adulthood. The findings indicate that fathers’ mental health is strongly correlated with their physical health, marital relationship quality, and relationship quality with their focal child across all age groups of fathers between 57- and 80-years-old. However, a transition seems to occur for fathers between 63- and 68-years-old that increases the within-time salience of fathers’ relationship quality with their focal child. In spite of the strong bivariate correlations, the structural equation models revealed high levels of within-trait stability and a lack of cross-trait predictive power among each of these aspects of fathers’ lives across age groups. The lone exception to this was in the emergence of a significant effect from father’s mental health between the ages of 69- and 74-years-old to their father-child relationship quality six years later, suggesting the possibility of a final transition in father-child relationship dynamics late in fathers’ lives.