Globally, each year 1.3 million neonates acquire human immunodeficiency virus during pregnancy, labour, and breastfeeding time. Replacing breastfeeding with recommended safe infant feeding practices significantly reduces the risk of transmission, nearly eliminating it. This study aimed to assess Human immunodeficiency virus exposed child feeding among 314 mothers with infants under 24 months old. Participants were selected using a systematic random sampling technique, and data were collected through a semi-structured questionnaire. Bivariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses employed to identify determinants for safe infant feeding. During interviews, the mean age of women was 32.35 years (standard deviation±4.5), and infants were 10.8(±3.951) months. The overall safe infant feeding was 67.2% (95% CI: 61.7, 72.9), with a mean knowledge score. By the study’s end, 9 infants (2.89%) were confirmed to be infected with virus based on dried blood sample test. Maternal promoting factors for safe infant practice included infant age 25–35 years (adjusted odd ratio (aOR) =2.9) completing high school education (adjusted odd ratio = 9.2), having a good knowledge score for infant feeding (adjusted odd ratio = 8.2), and urban residency (adjusted odd ratio = 2.2). On the other hand, being married made it 83% less likely for safe infant feeding practices (adjusted odd ratio = 0.17) compared to those never in a union. Two in three mothers practiced safe infant feeding for their HIV-exposed infants, with a mean knowledge score of 70.3%. Therefore, healthcare providers give accurate information and counselling services to make informed decisions about infant safe feeding.

Late Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium.

How do mothers deal with chronic violence and the constant presence of guns in their neighborhoods? How do they build situated meaning and discursive practices out of their experiences and relationships with armed actors? We compare the experiences of women in two poor and working-class neighborhoods in Caracas. Through this comparative ethnographic project, we aim to show how, in the midst of state-sponsored depredation and with an overwhelming presence of guns in their lives, women use their cultural roles as mothers to perform everyday forms of resistance vis-à-vis the different armed actors that impose their presence in the barrios. In the mothers’ daily struggles, dramatic discursive actions—from more openly oppositional ones, such as shouting, scolding, and talking, to more hidden ones, such as both “circulating gossip” and “captive gossip,” to more vulnerable ones, such as whispering—are main resources in the micropolitics of their neighborhoods. Our findings suggest that strategies are context dependent and most likely vary according to numerous factors, including the history of civic organizing, policing practices, and the type of armed actor with whom they cohabitate in their neighborhood.

Scholars have acknowledged that there is a systemic aspect to Catholic clerical sex abuse that acts as a type of grammar structuring behaviors and responses. Feminist critics in particular stress the patriarchal nature of the abuse that connects bishops, priests, and boys together. This essay argues that in addition to public systems dominated by men, there are also private structures that facilitate abuse. Using the extensive primary documentation assembled by BishopAccountability.org, I focus on the space of the home and the unique orientations of mothers and fathers to better understand the dynamics of clerical sex abuse in the American Catholic church. The essay begins with the abuse of a Milwaukee priest who tormented his parishioners from 1945 until his forced “retirement” in 1970. Drawing on themes found in this case, I examine other abuse narratives—focusing on how the Catholic understanding of alter Christus and mid-twentieth-century gender roles made the “good Catholic home” a particularly vulnerable place for abuse. Since public and private systems overlap, it is essential that the domestic aspects of clergy sex abuse also receive a full analysis.

Infants’ difficulty, typically characterized as proneness to negative emotionality, is commonly considered a risk for future maladaptive developmental trajectories, mostly because it often foreshadows increased parental power assertion, typically linked to future negative child outcomes. However, growing evidence of divergent developmental paths that unfold from infant difficulty has invigorated research on causes of such multifinality. Kochanska et al. (2019) proposed that parent and child Internal Working Models (IWMs) of each other are key, with the parent’s IWM of the child moderating the link between child difficulty and parental power assertion, and the child’s IWM of the parent moderating the link between power assertion and child outcomes. In Children and Parents Study (200 community mothers, fathers, and children), child difficulty was observed at 8 months, parents’ power assertion at 16 months, and children’s outcomes rated by parents at age 3. Parents’ IWMs were assessed with a mentalization measure at 8 months and children’s IWMs were coded from semi-projective narratives at age 3. The cascade from infant difficulty to maternal power assertion to negative child outcomes was present only when both the mother’s and the child’s IWMs of each other were negative. We did not support the model for father-child dyads.

It remains unclear how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mother–infant relationship and associations between maternal postpartum depression (PPD) and offspring temperament. This study examined the impact of the pandemic on these links and how maternal ratings of the mother–infant relationship mediated associations between PPD and infant temperament in a sample of treatment-seeking mothers in Ontario, Canada before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mothers with infants <12 months of age and Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale scores ≥10 enrolled in two separate randomized controlled trials of 1-day cognitive behavioral therapy-based workshops for PPD conducted before COVID-19 (n = 392) and during the pandemic (n = 403). Mothers reported on depressive symptomatology, infant temperament, and the mother–infant relationship. Maternal PPD was associated with more infant negative affectivity and mother–infant relationship difficulties. While associations between PPD and infant-focused anxiety were stronger during COVID-19, the pandemic did not otherwise affect associations between PPD and infant temperament. Mediation analyses suggested that aspects of the mother-infant relationship mediated associations between PPD and infant negative affectivity. Findings highlight the importance of detecting PPD and intervening to potentially improve outcomes for mothers and their children.

Infants’ high negative affectivity often initiates maladaptive parent-child relational processes that may involve both the parent’s and the child’s sides of the relationship. We proposed that infants’ high negative affectivity triggers distinct sequelae in dyads classified as avoidant, resistant, and disorganized, compared to secure dyads. In 200 community families, at 8 months, we observed infants’ negative affectivity; at 16 months, we assessed attachment organization and collected observations and reports of parent-related (responsiveness, resentment of child, power assertion, and intrusiveness) and child-related (social-emotional competence, opposition, and anger) constructs. In mother-child avoidant dyads, infants’ high negative affectivity was a significant precursor of mothers’ higher resentment and intrusiveness and children’s lower social-emotional competence. Those associations were significantly different than in secure dyads (in which none were significant). In father-child disorganized dyads, infants’ high negative affectivity was a significant precursor of fathers’ lower responsiveness and higher resentment; there were no association in secure dyads. Regardless of infants’ negative affectivity, compared to secure dyads, parents in resistant dyads expressed more resentment of child, and avoidant and resistant children were more oppositional to their fathers. The study illustrates multifinality in parent- and child-related processes that characterize unfolding early relational dynamics in dyads differing in just-emerging attachment.

Changes in children’s attachment security to mother and father were examined for 230 firstborn children (M = 31.17 months), their mothers and fathers participating in a longitudinal investigation starting in the last trimester of the mothers’ pregnancy and 1, 4, 8, and 12 months after the birth of an infant sibling. Both parents completed the Attachment Q-set at prenatal, 4, and 12 months. Growth mixture models revealed four latent classes in which children’s attachments were (a) both secure with a modest decline to both parents (68.3%); (b) more secure with father than mother with a steep decline for both (12.6%); (c) both insecure with no change (10%); and (d) more secure with mother than father with a modest increase for both (9.1%). Multi-group latent growth curve analyses revealed that parenting and coparenting differed across families. Children had lower externalizing behavior problems in families with two secure attachments than in families with one secure attachment, either to mother or to father, who, in turn, had fewer problems than children with two insecure attachments. Findings underscore the strengths of a family systems framework to understand attachment relationships with multiple caregivers and the family risks and protective factors that covary with children’s behavioral adjustment after the birth of a sibling.

Colostrum contains antibodies that protect the newborn against disease. Despite this fact, many Ethiopian mothers see colostrum feeding as a cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality. These mothers believe that colostrum must discard to alleviate this effect. However, the cause of this misconception about colostrum was not well researched, particularly in this study area. The main aim of the present study was to assess colostrum avoidance and associated factors among mothers having children aged 6–59 months in North Wollo Zone, Northeastern Ethiopia. An institution-based cross-sectional study design was used. Descriptive statistics, binary and multivariable logistic regression analyses were used for the statistical analysis. The prevalence of colostrum avoidance was 19 % (95 % CI 15⋅03, 22⋅89 %) among mother–child pair aged 6–59 months. In multivariable logistic regression analysis, the most important predictors were breast-feeding initiation Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR) 6⋅369; 95 %, Confidence Interval (CI) (3⋅067, 13⋅224), pre-lacteal feeding AOR 3⋅464; 95 % CI (1⋅721, 6⋅973), shared household decision about child feeding AOR 3⋅585; 95 % CI (1⋅563, 7⋅226), Index child sex AOR 2⋅103; 95 % CI (1⋅015, 4⋅358) and health facility delivery AOR 3⋅033; 95 % CI (1⋅293, 7⋅117). The colostrum avoidance in the present study was 19 %. The study recommends the promotion of institutional delivery, timely initiation of breast-feeding, the shared household decisions about child feeding, avoiding sex preferences and stopping pre-lacteal feeding were critically important.