Emotional Availability (EA) in mother-child and father-child interactions: development in an international context

The thematic content of this Poster Workshop is emotional availability (EA) in mother-child and father-child interactions. EA refers
to 4 caregiver qualities (sensitivity, structuring, nonintrusiveness, and nonhostility) and 2 child qualities (responsiveness to the adult
and involvement of the adult) and is assessed with the observational EA Scales (Biringen et al., 1998; Biringen, 2008). Although
framed as adult and child qualities, each of the EA dimensions is actually dyadic, and it is the relationship that is assessed. The 4
posters from an international authorship, comprised of Australian, Dutch, Finnish, Portuguese, US, and UK contributors, highlight the
role of EA in predicting significant aspects of infant and parent development from infancy through the preschool years. Two of the
posters focus on the role of fathers, both in connection with mothers in the family context, as well as separate agents of emotion
socialization. The first paper on fathers, from Portugal, examines the association between infant emotion regulation and father-child
emotional availability, as well as the role of infant temperament. The second paper, from the Netherlands, examines whether fathers
can moderate the effects of maternal emotional complaints on child outcomes, with an examination of the gender of the infant. The
additional 2 posters from Finland/US and from Australia/UK focus on mother-child EA and how EA is associated with important
aspects of child development (e.g., not only social/emotional competence but also cognitive and language competence), as well as
parent characteristics (including stress and the parent's proclivity to represent the child as a separate individual whose behavior is
meaningful and purposeful — "mind-mindedness"). Rather than sole reliance on the concept of parental sensitivity, many of the
papers emphasize the multi-dimensional EA framework (including the "negative" EA qualities, such as nonintrusiveness and
nonhostility) and also the child's side of emotional availability. Three of the papers use the 3rd edition of the EA Scales, whereas the
paper from Finland extends the use of the EA system and will describe findings with the 4th edition (including 7 sub-scales for each of
the 6 EA dimensions). These studies, all conducted in the context of low-risk mother-child and father-child interactions, confirm the
value of examining the richness and complexity of parent-child emotional availability/unavailability.