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AIMS:

To analyse mothers' self-assessed quality of interaction with their children and their opinions about child difficulty with respect to socio-economic status and subjective factors: postnatal depression, social isolation, sense of coherence and locus of control.

METHODS AND MATERIAL:

A comprehensive questionnaire was completed by 1039 mothers of 18-mo-old children participating in the baseline measurements of a Swedish multicentre study developing and testing a new psychosocial model for the child health services.

RESULTS:

All subjective factors, including the number of factors, showed significant associations with perceived interaction and difficultness. Effect sizes of subjective factors ranged from about 0.3 to 1 SD for interaction, and from about 0.2 to 0.8 SD for difficultness. As for difficultness, effect sizes were larger for boys. There were no associations between high socio-economic status and high-quality interaction or low child difficultness: the few significant differences in fact favoured low-status children.

CONCLUSION:

The results provided some contradictory findings to the well-known association between high socio-economic status and favourable outcome. This result is of practical relevance for interventions: supportive programmes cannot be limited to areas and families of low socio-economic status. Positive effects may ensue if subjective factors like those studied here can be promoted among parents and children through the child health services.