Factores predictivos de sensibilidad materna en infancia temprana

The sensibility of the mother is defined as the ability of the mother to be aware, to interpret adequately and to answer of appropriately and in agreement to the signs and communications of the child (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters & Wall, 1978). This construct would be related to multiple characteristics of the child as well as of the adult. Different studies show that factors like the sex of the child, the socioeconomic level of the family, the educational level of the mother, among others, are variables that predict differences in sensitivity of the mother. Based on those studies, the present paper aims at exploring the predictive power of some of those variables in a sample of Chilean mother-child dyads. All children were 1 year old and attended child care centers. The mothers' sensibility was assessed by the Adult Scale of Sensibility, E.S.A (Santelices et to, 2012) and the socio-demographic variables by a questionnaire validated in previous studies. The results show that both the educational level of the mother, her age and the family's socioeconomic level are statistically significant predictors for the mothers' sensibility.