Journal
DEVELOPMENT AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Volume 33, Issue 5, Pages 1648-1664Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/S095457942100064X
Keywords
caregiving; developmental psychopathology; parent-child relationship; RDoC; social processes
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Funding
- American Psychological Foundation
- Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood
- Jacobs Foundation [2017-1261-05, 2016-1251-07]
- National Institute of Child Health and Development [F32HD100079]
- National Institute of Mental Health [R21MH122781]
- Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences
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This paper discusses the importance of the relationship between caregivers and infants for their survival and well-being, and proposes using the RDoC initiative to assess caregivers' social processes. It emphasizes how past research can guide new directions in studying caregiving and parent-child relationships through this innovative extension.
The relationships infants and young children have with their caregivers are fundamental to their survival and well-being. Theorists and researchers across disciplines have attempted to describe and assess the variation in these relationships, leading to a general acceptance that caregiving is critical to understanding child functioning, including developmental psychopathology. At the same time, we lack consensus on how to assess these fundamental relationships. In the present paper, we first review research documenting the importance of the caregiver-child relationship in understanding environmental risk for psychopathology. Second, we propose that the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative provides a useful framework for extending the study of children's risk for psychopathology by assessing their caregivers' social processes. Third, we describe the units of analysis for caregiver social processes, documenting how the specific subconstructs in the domain of social processes are relevant to the goal of enhancing knowledge of developmental psychopathology. Lastly, we highlight how past research can inform new directions in the study of caregiving and the parent-child relationship through this innovative extension of the RDoC initiative.
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