Exploring Maternal Unpredictability in the Context of Children with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities

Early caregiving constitutes a critical context for infant neurodevelopment, shaping cognitive, emotional and neurobiological outcomes across development. Within this context, the temporal organisation of maternal sensory signals has been identified as a distinct and developmentally relevant dimension of caregiving in typically developing populations. However, its role in the context of neurodevelopmental disabilities (ND) remains unexplored. The present study aimed to examine maternal unpredictability, operationalised as entropy rate, in a sample of 61 mother-child dyads including children with ND and typically developing children, exploring group differences in entropy rate, the role of infant sex and age, and associations with maternal well-being. Maternal sensory signals were coded from five-minute video-recorded free-play interactions and entropy rate was calculated for each mother. Maternal well-being was assessed through standardised self-report questionnaires. No significant group difference in entropy rate was found, and infant sex was not associated with entropy rate in either group. However, a significant interaction between group and age revealed that infant age significantly predicted entropy rate in the control group, while no significant association was observed in the clinical group. In the clinical group only, entropy rate was significantly associated with concurrent maternal state anxiety. These findings suggest that the challenge in the context of ND may not lie in elevated unpredictability per se, but in a failure to develop progressively more organised caregiving patterns over time, joining a growing body of research on the role of maternal caregiving behaviour in early development and highlighting potential implications for family-centred early intervention.