The Moderating Role of Mother's Reflective Functioning in the Relationship Between Child's Temperament and Quality of Mother-Child Relationship

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between child temperament and the quality of mother-child relation-ship and to determine the moderating role of the mother's reflective functioning in the relationship between these two vari-ables. The statistical sample consisted of 270 mothers who were obtained by convenie-nce sampling method and answered three questionnaires of middle childhood temp-erament, parental reflective functioning and child-mother relationship scale. Pear-son correlation coefficient and regression were used to analyze the data. The ana-lysis showed that with the exception of the component of distractibility, all other components of the child's temperament and all three components of mother's refl-ective functioning had a significant relat-ionship with the quality of mother-child relationship. The results of regression ana-lysis to examine the moderation hypoth-esis of mother's reflective functioning showed that mother's prementalizing mod-es was a significant moderator of the rela-tionship between child level activity, rhy-thmicity and attention span and per-sistence with the quality of mother-child relationship. interest and curiosity in men-tal states also significantly modified the relationship between rhythmicity and attention span and persistence with the quality of mother-child relationship.