Children, Parents, And Development In The First Decade (

Child Health And Human Development

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

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 first two decades 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, functions, and processes 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, Canada, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and Korea 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 performance across 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 decades of life. For example, socioeconomic status (SES) is conceived of as a multidimensional construct that is indexed by quantitative factors having to do with parents' educational achievement, occupational status, and financial income. In a multilevel study of European American families of diverse SES, we used structural equation modeling to explore direct and indirect relations of SES for multiple indexes of maternal parenting and multiple indicators of infant development. The predictive validity of SES was evaluated as a composite, and its several components evaluated alone. Although each component of SES predicted some aspects of maternal and infant behavior, maternal education proved the most robust unique predictor of SES effects, separate too from maternal intelligence and personality. 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 contend that the family generally, and the mother-child relationship specifically, are 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, Canada, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and Korea as well as the United States. For example, one study examined similarities and differences in mothers' and infants' activities and interactions among Japanese American and South American immigrant dyads when infants were 5-months of age. Few relations between maternal acculturation level or individualism/collectivism and maternal parenting or infant behaviors emerged in either group. However, group differences were found in mothers' and infants' behaviors indicating that mothers' culture-of-origin continues to influence parenting behavior in these acculturating groups. Cultural generality and specificity in relations among and between mothers' and infants' behaviors were examined next. Few relations among mothers' behaviors emerged, except for that between mothers' social behavior and other types of maternal behavior, which appear to reflect a common collectivist orientation of these two cultural groups. Few relations among infants' behaviors emerged, suggesting that there is independence and plasticity in infant behavioral organization. Several expected relations between mothers' and infants' behaviors also emerged, pointing to some universal characteristics in mother-infant interactions. The CFRS also conducts a broad program of research in behavioral pediatrics that investigates questions at the interface of child development with physical health and biological development. This research program has several different facets. One area of research concerns fetal function and its predictive validity for postnatal function. For example, we measured and quantified fetal cardiac function at 24, 30, and 36 weeks gestation in terms of heart rate, variability, and episodic accelerations and later evaluated children's language capacity at 27 months. 30- and 36-week-old fetuses that displayed greater heart-rate variability and more episodic accelerations, and fetuses that exhibited a more precipitous increase in heart-rate variability and acceleration over gestation achieved higher levels of language competence. Cardiac patterning during gestation appears to reflect an underlying neural substrate that persists through early childhood: Individual variation in rate of development could be stable, or efficient cardiac function could positively influence the underlying neural substrate to enhance cognitive performance.