The Relationship between Maternal Working Memory and Child's Resilience with the Mediating Role of Parental Reflective Functioning

Introduction: Since, executive functions can be interpreted as a universal set of cognitive capacities which promote purposeful behaviors, investigating the role of executive functions of parents, especially the important role of mothers in daily parent-child interaction and finally, fostering children's resilience is an important step.As a result, the purpose of this research was to determine the mediating role of parents' reflective capacity in the relationship between mothers' working memory weakness and their children's resilience. Materials and Methods:The present study was a descriptive cross -sectional study.The statistical population of this research included 200 mothers who had children between 6 and 11 years old, and lived in Tehran in 2023.They were selected by available sampling method.Data collection tools were parental reflective functioning questionnaires, cognitive abilities and the revised version of children's resilience.Data analysis was conducted by Pearson correlation test and path analysis using SPSS v.26 software. Results:The results indicated that weakness in working memory had a direct, negative and significant relationship with the child's resilience (=-0.23,p<0.01).Also, weakness in working memory had a direct and positive impact on prementalizing (=0.30) and a direct and negative effect on certainty in recognizing mental states (=-0.23)and on interest and curiosity about mental states (=-0.20)(p<0.001).Finally, prementalizing had a significant negative effect (=-0.30), and certainty in recognizing mental states (=0.31) and curiosity and interest about mental states (=0.24) had a significant positive effect on child resilience (p<0.001). Conclusion:The results of this research supported the mediating role of the components of parental reflective functioning in the relationship between maternal working memory and the child's resilience and revealed that strengthening the components of parental reflective functioning and the mother's working memory can be a useful intervention for improving children's resilience.