Retrospective self-report assessments of adults’ childhood experiences with their parents are widely employed in psychological science, but such assessments are rarely validated against actual parenting experiences measured during childhood. Here, we leveraged prospectively acquired data characterizing mother–child and father–child relationship quality using observations, parent reports, and child reports covering infancy through adolescence. At age 26 years, approximately 800 participants completed a retrospective measure of maternal and paternal emotional availability during childhood. Retrospective reports of childhood emotional availability demonstrated weak convergence with composites reflecting prospectively acquired observations (R²s = .01–.05) and parent reports (R²s = .02–.05) of parenting quality. Retrospective parental availability was more strongly associated with prospective assessments of child-reported parenting quality (R²s = .24–.25). However, potential sources of bias (i.e., depressive symptoms and family closeness and cohesiveness at age 26 years) accounted for more variance in retrospective reports (39%–40%) than did prospective measures (26%), suggesting caution when using retrospective reports of childhood caregiving quality as a proxy for prospective data.

对成年人与父母的童年经历的回顾性自我报告评估在心理科学中被广泛使用，但这种评估很少能与童年时期测量的实际育儿经历相验证。在这里，我们利用从婴儿期到青春期的观察、父母报告和儿童报告，利用前瞻性获得的描述母子和父子关系质量的数据。在 26 岁时，大约 800 名参与者完成了一项对童年时期母亲和父亲情绪可用性的回顾性测量。儿童情绪可用性的回顾性报告表明，与反映前瞻性观察的复合材料（R ² s = .01-.05）和父母报告（R² s = .02–.05) 的育儿质量。回顾性父母可用性与儿童报告的养育质量的前瞻性评估更密切相关（R ² s = .24-.25）。然而，与前瞻性测量（26%）相比，回顾性报告（39%–40%）的潜在偏倚来源（即抑郁症状和家庭亲密性和凝聚力）造成的差异更大（26%），这表明在使用回顾性报告时要谨慎儿童看护质量作为前瞻性数据的代表。