Professionals' and mothers' beliefs about maternal sensitivity across cultures: toward effective interventions in multicultural societies

Abstract

Interventions for parents of young children often focus on enhancing parental sensitivity. A cognitive match on treatment goals has been shown to relate to the quality of the relationship (or alliance) between a therapist and the person receiving intervention, which in turn predicts the effectiveness of interventions. However, in multicultural societies therapists and patients do not always share the same ethnic background, which could influence their match on treatment goals. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that there is a cognitive match regarding the importance of sensitivity in early childhood parenting across Dutch and Moroccan, Turkish, Surinamese, and Antillean ethnic minority mothers and youth mental health professionals in the Netherlands and Turkish mothers and youth mental health professionals in Turkey. A total of 105 mothers with at least one child between the ages of 6 months and 6 years and 98 female professionals described their views about the ideal sensitive mother using the Maternal Behavior Q-Sort (Pederson et al. in Manual maternal behavior Q-sort version 3.1, 1999). Both professionals’ and mothers’ beliefs about the ideal mother converged strongly with the concept of sensitivity and within and across cultural groups of mothers and professionals. These findings point to a cognitive match on sensitivity beliefs between mothers and professionals with different cultural backgrounds. Our findings suggest that early childhood parenting interventions focused on enhancing sensitivity fit the beliefs of mothers of young children in different cultural groups.