Children, Parents, And Development In 1st Decade Of Life

Child Health And Human Development

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

The Child and Family Research Section (CFRS) investigates dispositional, experiential, and environmental factors that contribute to physical, mental, emotional, and social development in human beings during the early years of the life course. Laboratory and home-based studies employ a variety of approaches, including psychophysiological recordings, experimental techniques, behavioral observations, standardized assessments, rating scales, interviews, and demographic records. The overall goals of research in the CFRS are to describe, analyze, and assess the capabilities and proclivities of developing children, including their genetic characteristics, physiological functioning, perceptual and cognitive abilities, emotional, social, and interactional styles, as well as the nature and consequences for children and parents of family development, and children's exposure to and interactions with the inanimate environment. Research topics concern the origins, status, and development of multiple psychological constructs, structures, and functions across the early years of life; effects of child cognitive and social characteristics and activities on parents; and the meaning for children's development of variations in parenting and in the family across different sociodemographic and cultural groups. Project designs underway in the CFRS are longitudinal, cross-sectional, and cross-cultural. Sociodemographic comparisons under investigation include family socioeconomic status, maternal age and employment status, and child parity and daycare experience. Study sites include Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, and Kenya, as well as the United States; cross-cultural as well as intra-cultural comparisons of human development are pursued. Before children are old enough to enter formal social learning situations, nearly all of their experiences stem directly from interactions they have with their primary caregivers. In this project, the CFRS focuses on the extent to which maternal characteristics (age, parenthood status, parity, employment status, as well as type of substitute care experienced during mother's employment) influence observed relations between caregiving and children's developing cognitive and social competencies. In a longitudinal design, families are visited when children are 5 and 20 months and 4, 10, and 14 years of age. At 5 months, mother-infant interaction is observed. At 20 months, measures of toddler functioning (play competence, language development, and social adaptation) and maternal behavior (play and intelligence) are obtained. At 4, 10, and 14 years, children's diverse abilities (representational competence, problem solving, reasoning skills, mathematical ability, language use and discourse, and selected aspects of generally adaptive behavior) are examined. Associations among measures across ages are evaluated, and group performances among all measures within age are compared. The premise underlying this research is that development in childhood occurs primarily within an interpersonal context; thus, a central goal is to describe how diverse child and maternal behaviors relate to the ontogeny of central dimensions of children's mental and social competencies. Major objectives are to study stability, continuity, interaction, and predictive validity in mental and social development over the first decade (or so) of life. Experiences in infancy and early childhood are acknowledged not only to affect the course and outcome of development, but they are credited for some of the distinctiveness of culture. Cross-cultural developmental study has shown that variations in childrearing styles have implications for human development. Many theorists have contended that the family generally, and the mother-child relationship specifically, may be vital to development of the individual and basic to the organization of the culture. As a result, investigators have frequently studied parents and mother-child interactions in attempts to address questions about the origins and development of cultural identity. Of course, each society has evolved patterns of childrearing adjusted to its own special demands. Within-culture comparisons are equally important to cross-cultural ones. A central purpose of this project is to identify similarities and differences in child development and parenting in the contrasting childcaring ecologies of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, and Kenya, as well as the United States. The CFRS also conducts a broad program of research in behavioral pediatrics that investigates questions at the interface of child development and physical health and biological development. This research program has several different facets. The first area of research concerns basic psychophysiological principles centering on the role of vagal function in psychological development. The second area of research concerns itaself with fetal function and its post-natal predictive validity. Development under cocaine exposure comprises a third major area of research; studies address issues central to understanding ongoing transactions between biological factors and environmental conditions associated with pre- and postnatal cocaine exposure as they relate to diverse developmental outcomes. Fourth, the CFRS has a research program which investigates the role of deafness in child development and family life with samples that include hearing children of hearing parents, deaf children of hearing parents, deaf children of hearing parents, and deaf children of deaf parents. Last, research in child development and early health care includes studies of children's knowledge, implementation, and evaluation of strategies for coping with stressful medical experiences; the development of children's understanding of health and health care; and relations among children's own health histories, pediatric health care utilization, and maternal health beliefs.