Want To See How Good A Parent You'll Be? Play With Dolls
Want to know how good a parent you'll be? Play with dolls. Not just any dolls but ones that having expectant parents role-play interacting with an infant using a doll can help predict which couples may be headed for co-parenting conflicts when their baby arrives, newswise.com reports. Researchers videotaped 182 couples in the third trimester of pregnancy while they played with a doll that they were told represented the baby they were about to have. Researchers analyzed how the couple interacted with each other around the doll. The couples were videotaped again nine months after the birth of their baby to see how they actually played together. Results showed that couples acted as similarly toward each other with the real baby as they did with the doll – in both positive and negative ways. “The extent to which couples support or undermine each other’s interactions with the doll predicts their co-parenting behavior a year later,” said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-a...