Lo sviluppo delle interazioni madre-padre-bambino dalla gravidanza al nono mese attraverso il Lausanne Trilogue Play. Una replicazione in ambito italiano.

Background: Infant-parent interaction is one of the basic aspects of early relationship and constitutes the main experience of behavioural, affective and emotional exchange in the first year of life. These early characteristics of the co-construction of the infant’s relational competences are the focus of interest in the research on early interactive-relational models in the triadic perspective. This study combines the interactive-relational perspective, which describes early development in terms of the quality of adult-infant interactions, and the Lausanne developmental systems approach, which focuses on the father-mother-infant primary triangle, beginning with its formation during pregnancy and is based on the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) observational paradigm. The aims of the study were to investigate a) the psychometric characteristics of the administration and coding of the pre-natal and post-natal LTP procedure; b) the patterns of stability and/or change in the triadic family interactions from pregnancy to 9 months. Method: 70 non-refered primiparous families were recruited at child-birth courses of two Italian hospitals. Observational data were collected at time 1 (7th months of pregnancy) in the prenatal LTP, and at postnatal times 2 and 3 (4 and 9 months). Results: The data show a good reliability of the LTP coding and a consistent factorial structure in line with the validation studies (Carneiro et al., 2006; Favez et al., 2006). The multilevel analyses highlight an improvement of the family interactions over the first year. Findings show a linear relation between the time and the quality of family interactions, that improves by 2.35 point in each observational phase: there is no stability of family interactions, but the quality of triadic family interactions increases from pregnancy to parenthood. Conclusion: The adult interactive capacities in pregnancy represent an interactive matrix for the construction of the early family relations in the first year and may be considered as protective factors in the child development of early triadic interactive abilities. Generally, the LTP procedure seems to show a good psychometric characteristics of the administration both in the coding system.