Parental reflective functioning and the development of self-regulation: An examination of the relationship between parental reflective functioning and children's capacity to delay gratification

The ability to voluntarily delay gratification is viewed as a fundamental component of the developing self-regulatory capacities of a young child. Mischel and his colleagues' "marshmallow test" is a simple laboratory procedure designed to simulate the difficulty of voluntarily delayed gratification that has come to be viewed as a powerful diagnostic tool for illuminating stable and consequential individual differences. Fonagy and his colleagues' concept of mentalization (1991), operationalized as reflective functioning (RF), views self-regulation and mentalization as inextricably linked, emerging from one another. Parental reflective functioning (Slade, 2005) assesses a parent's capacity to mentalize about her child. The present study aimed to test the hypothesis that higher levels of parental RF as assessed on the Parent Development Interview (PDI) would be associated with better delay performance on Mischel's self-imposed delay of gratification procedure, as measured by the amount of time the child is able to delay gratification, while the children of parents who exhibit lower levels of parental RF would delay for shorter periods of time on the delay task. The study found no evidence of a relationship between parental RF and the length of time a child was able to delay gratification. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for future research into the development of self-regulation in young children, as well as for attachment and mentalization theory and research.