A systematic review and meta-analysis on the relationship between mothers’ and fathers’ parental mentalizing and children’s socioemotional functioning

Introduction: Parental mentalizing refers to the parent’s ability to recognize and interpret children’s behaviour in terms of mental states (e.g. emotions, desires, thoughts). Several studies have shown that parental reflective functioning may influence different children’s outcomes. Recently, researchers suggested to examine the role of parental mentalizing on children’s socioemotional functioning: this latter can be defined as a series of emotional, relational, and behavioral processes which are crucial for the child mental health, as they allow children to understand and adapt to environmental challenges. Although several studies have been conducted on this topic, results still appear mixed, making difficult to draw conclusions. Moreover, literature largely focused on the role of maternal mentalizing, giving less attention to the contribution of paternal mentalizing, thus different questions remain unclear. Therefore, the present systematic review and meta-analysis aims at exploring the relationship between mothers’ and/or fathers’ parental mentalizing and children’s socioemotional functioning. Methods: This study adhered to PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Literature search was conducted between October and December 2024 in the following databases: APA PsycInfo, APA PsycArticles, Scopus and Pubmed. Research yielded 2524 articles. At the end of screening phase, 51 studies were included in the systematic review. However, among these, only 7 papers were included in the meta-analysis due to the lack of homogeneity between studies. Results: Results of the systematic review firstly confirmed the prevalence of studies only on the role of mothers in influencing children’s functioning. More importantly, findings predominantly provided evidence for the existence of a direct relationship between parental mentalizing and children’s socioemotional functioning both for mothers and for fathers, although some differences were noticeable. Results of the meta-analysis highlight the presence of a significant negative association between one of the dimensions of the mothers’ parental mentalizing, namely certainty about mental states, and children’s socioemotional problems. Discussion: Implications for future research and clinical practice focused on parental mentalizing will be discussed.