DEVELOPMENT OF A PLEASURE IN PARENTING SCALE

Two major components of parenting have been identified: warmth and con trol. There has been a great deal of work on the measurement of contro l, but there are not many measures of parental warmth. As part of an a ttempt to develop better measures of warmth, we developed a scale meas uring parents' pleasure in carrying out routine caretaking acts with t heir children. This measure was then related to other measures of posi tive support such as observation, observer ratings and questionnaires. As there is evidence in the literature that quality of the environmen t interacts with parenting, we related the measure to measures of stre ss, observer ratings of quality of the home, marital interaction and p arental mood. Finally, we examined the relation of child variables (at tachment classification, temperament rating and observed behaviours) t o the parents' ratings of pleasure in the child.