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child and family development

in the first two decades of life

Marc H. Bornstein, PhD, Head, Child and Family Research Section Chun-Shin Hahn, PhD, Research Fellow Nanmathi Manian, PhD, Research Fellow Maurice Haynes, PhD, Staff Scientist Charlie Hendricks, PhD, Senior Research Assistant Diane Leach, PhD, Senior Research Assistant Clay Mash, PhD, Senior Research Assistant Kathy Painter, MA, Research Psychologist Joan Suwalsky, MA, Research Psychologist Motti Gini, PhD, Visiting Fellow Elisabeth Conradt, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Marianne Heslington, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Melissa Kline, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Shehreen Latif, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Jennifer Meeter, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Jeanette Sawyer, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Stacey Schulman, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Elizabeth Seiver, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Matthew Stevenson, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Benjamin Tabak, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow Julia Bernstein, Summer Student Aleksandra Palchuk, Summer Student Linda Cote, PhD, Guest Researcher Corina Midgett, MSc, Guest Researcher Kirsten Schulthess, MD, Guest Researcher Hyeyoung Shin, BS, Guest Researcher Ivana Vaughn, MPH, Guest Researcher Gang Wang, Guest Researcher

We investigate dispositional, experiential, and environmental factors that contribute to physical, mental, emotional, and social development in human beings during the first two decades of life. Our overall goals are to describe, analyze, and assess the capabilities and proclivities of developing human beings, including their genetic characteristics, physiological functioning, perceptual and cognitive abilities, and 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 their physical surroundings. Project designs are experimental, longitudinal, and cross-sectional as well as intracultural and cross-cultural. Sociodemographic comparisons include family socioeconomic status, maternal age and employment status, and child parity and daycare experience. Study sites include Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Peru, and the Republic of South Korea as well as the United States. Parenting Bornstein, Hahn, Haynes, Hendricks, Leach, Painter, Suwalsky We are broadly concerned with analyzing and understanding the roles of parenting in human development. We investigated the role of maternal age across nearly the full feasible range (13 to 47 years) in mothers of five-month-olds and mothers of 20-month-olds. Few differences emerged in the way mothers behaved with their five-month-old infants. Mothers of all ages were generally similar in their nurturing behaviors, encouragement of motor skills, social exchange, didactic interactions, and material provisions for their infants. As maternal age increased, however, so did mothers’ frequency and duration of speech and maternal sensitivity and structuring in interactions with their infants. Maternal age was also related to a number of perinatal history and social support variables. In cases exhibiting a significant relation with maternal age, mothers often evidenced a linear trend through the teens and 20s, with the trend line then flattening in the 30s and 40s. In mothers of 20-month-olds, maternal age was generally related to more parenting satisfaction, less limit setting, more parenting knowledge, higher internal and external parenting attributions of failure, longer utterance and more vocabulary in speech to children, and more praise and expressions of physical affection. However, as with the five-month findings, different patterns of relations were evident when the sample was split into two groups: under 28 years and 28 years or older. For younger mothers, relations between maternal age and beliefs and behaviors were generally stronger than relations found in the full sample. For older mothers, maternal age was associated only with greater satisfaction and the use of more diverse vocabulary with their children. Sequential analysis, the analysis of temporal patterns in sequentially recorded events or behaviors of individuals or groups, can be used to describe patterns of behavior in real time and help explain behavior by assessing contingency. It thus offers a dynamic approach to the study of behaviors engendered by social interactions. We used sequential analysis to explore the concept of temporal contingency of maternal and infant vocalizations and to compare adolescent and adult mothers. When their infants were five-months-old, adolescent mothers and adult mothers were videotaped at home for 5 hours. Focusing on vocalization, we coded mutually exclusive and exhaustive behavioral codes online as timed-sequential data to evaluate several domains of mother-infant interaction with a time unit of 0.1 s. With respect to base rates of vocalizations, adolescent mothers spoke less to their infants, and male infants vocalized nondistress more than female infants. Results of analysis of variance showed that, in general, mothers and infants vocalized contingently in response to each others’ vocalizations. For female infants, adult mothers vocalized more contingently than adolescent mothers. However, contingency of infant nondistress vocalization did not differ between adolescent and adult mothers. That is, when mothers vocalized, adolescent mothers were equally likely as adult mothers to evoke contingent infant nondistress vocalizations. These results contribute to our understanding of adolescent parenting and show that introducing temporality into research questions of contingency yields greater insight into the dynamics of mother-infant interaction. To explore differences in the impact of parenting on sibling development, we undertook a multivariate within-family study of maternal parenting beliefs and behaviors and sibling socioemotional behaviors with first- and second-born children. Mothers and their firstborns participated when their first-born children were 20-months-old, and the same mothers participated in the same study protocol with their secondborns when those children were 20 months old. Despite children’s development and structural changes in the family, most maternal beliefs did not change in their mean level (with the exception of parenting knowledge, which increased), and maternal beliefs remained consistently stable between children. Similarly, group mean levels of maternal social behaviors in interaction with first- and second-born children did not change. However, contrary to maternal beliefs, the stability of maternal social behaviors across time was low. Whereas mothers may be consistent in the social domain of parenting, their children appeared to differ somewhat in socioemotional development. Bornstein MH, ed. Handbook of Parenting (five volumes). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. Bornstein MH. Positive parenting and positive development in children. In: Lerner RM, Jacobs F, Wertlieb D, eds. Handbook of Applied Developmental Science: Promoting Positive Child, Adolescent, and Family Development Through Research, Policies, and Programs (Vol. 1 Applying Developmental Science for Youth and Families: Historical and Theoretical Foundations). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003;187-209. Bornstein MH, Bradley RH, eds. Socioeconomic Status, Parenting, and Child Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003. Bornstein MH, Hahn C-S, Suwalsky JTD, Haynes OM. Socioeconomic status, parenting, and child development: the Hollingshead Four-Factor Index of Social Status and the Socioeconomic Index of Occupations. In: Bornstein MH, Bradley RH, eds. Socioeconomic Status, Parenting, and Child Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003;29-82. Bornstein MH, Hendricks C, Hahn C-S, Haynes OM, Painter KM, Tamis-LeMonda CS. Contributors to self-perceived competence, satisfaction, investment, and role balance in maternal parenting: a multivariate ecological analysis. Parenting: Science and Practice 2003;3:285-326. Infant and child development Bornstein, Haynes, Leach, Mash; in collaboration with Arterberry The capacity to categorize objects, events, and other aspects of experience lies at the core of adaptive, intelligent behavior. In this context, categorization refers to the treatment of discriminable entities as equivalent in some way. Without this ability, every distinct encounter with the environment would demand a unique response, a demand that would quickly exceed human capability. When treating similar entities as equivalent, functionally relevant information about each one can be stored in a unified manner instead of stored redundantly across each instance. Furthermore, accessing the representations that are associated with a given category can furnish information about completely novel entities as soon as those entities are categorized. Because of its far-reaching adaptive significance, the origin and early development of categorization remains of great interest. Accumulated evidence now indicates that human infants are surprisingly capable of formulating and representing categories of visual information. We examined categorization in young children in two studies by using a sequential touching procedure. In one study, we assessed 12-, 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds’ categorization at superordinate, basic, and subordinate levels in four object domains (animals, vehicles, fruit, and furniture) that contrasted living with nonliving objects and stationary with moving objects. Superordinate categorization was uniformly good across these ages; basic categorization emerged during this period, first for high perceptual contrasts and later for low perceptual contrasts; subordinate categorization was uniformly absent across all ages. A developmental advantage for categorization of living things emerged. In a second study, we replicated 20-month-olds’ categorization and explored it in greater depth in six object domains (animals, vehicles, fruit, furniture, tools, and dishes). Domain sets also contrasted category level and relevant versus irrelevant perceptual features. Twenty-month-old children categorized at the superordinate and basic levels but not at the subordinate level; they categorized multiple superordinate domains; when categorizing, they ignored irrelevant perceptual attribute information, such as size and color. We are conducting an analysis of preschool children’s multiple intelligences. To date, we have examined the structure and organization of intelligence, differences in intelligences across subpopulations, the relations between intelligences and sociodemographic variables, concurrent associations between intelligences and other behavioral, cognitive, and social factors, individual differences in patterns of intelligences, and the effect of schooling on intelligences. For example, we first tested a seven-factor hierarchical structural equation model. The model consisted of 16 indicator variables that each loaded on one of six first-order factors (Bodily-Kinesthetic, Spatial, Logical-Mathematical, Linguistic, Narrative, and Interpersonal intelligences) and the six first-order factors loaded on a second-order General Intelligence factor. The hierarchical model fit the data both alone and when controlling for socioeconomic status, maternal verbal intelligence, and maternal age. The model also fit well for boys and girls. We saved factor scores and explored group differences by gender and on subsets of first- and second-born siblings and adopted and nonadopted children. Girls scored higher than boys on General Intelligence, Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence, and Narrative Intelligence. No differences emerged between first- and second-born children on the seven intelligences, and only one difference emerged between adopted and nonadopted groups, with nonadopted children scoring higher on Interpersonal Intelligence. Maternal hours of employment were significantly negatively correlated with General Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, and Interpersonal Intelligence (stronger negative correlations for boys than girls). The Hollingshead Index (SES) was significantly positively correlated with General Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, and Interpersonal Intelligence. Maternal age was significantly correlated only with General Intelligence and Linguistic Intelligence. Internalizing behavior was negatively correlated with General Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, and Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence. Externalizing behavior was negatively correlated with General Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, and Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence. Children who scored high on any intelligence tended to score at average or slightly below average on all other intelligences. Children who showed a deficiency in one intelligence tended to score average or slightly above average in the others. Children who attended preschool outscored in General Intelligence as well as in Linguistic and Interpersonal intelligences their counterparts who did not attend preschool. However, when we controlled for sociodemographic factors that also distinguished preschool attendees from nonattendees, we found the differences in intelligence to be attenuated. Bornstein MH, Arterberry M. Recognition, discrimination and categorization of smiling by 5-month-old infants. Developmental Science 2003;6:585-599. Bornstein MH, Arterberry M, Mash C. Perceptual development. In: Bornstein MH, Lamb ME, eds. Developmental Science: An Advanced Textbook, Fifth Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005, in press. Bornstein MH, Arterberry ME, Mash C. Long-term memory for an emotional interpersonal interaction occurring at 5 months of age. Infancy 2004;6:407-416. Bornstein MH, Hahn C-S, Haynes OM. Specific and general language performance across early childhood: stability and gender considerations. First Language 2004;24;267-304. Family acculturation in modern America Bornstein, Cote America is a country composed of acculturating peoples; their countries of origin are constantly changing, and the nature of acculturation itself is elusive. Current Bureau of the Census statistics indicate that one out of every five children under the age of 18, or 14 million children, in the United States are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrant parents. Yet, acculturation as a scientific phenomenon is not well understood; moreover, acculturation is a major transforming force on child health and human development. We study families acculturating to the United States from Japan and South America, assessing acculturation’s role in parenting, child development, and family life. After 52 months’ acculturation, South American mothers in the United States engaged in more social behavior, talked to their infants more, and provided more auditory stimulation in their infants’ environment than Japanese American mothers in the United States. Like their mothers, South American infants engaged in more social behaviors than Japanese American infants, even when the behavior of the interactional partner was controlled. No cultural differences emerged in mother’s nurturing, encouragement of infants’ locomotor development, or didactic behavior, suggesting that mothers in these two cultural groups foster children’s health, physical, and cognitive growth, respectively, based on the infants’ developmental needs rather than on cultural proscriptions. Most of the infant behaviors showed no cultural differences, suggesting that the behaviors may be canalized during early infancy or that cultural differences in these behaviors become apparent only at later ages. We also examined relations among and between maternal and infant behaviors. Japanese American and South American mothers’ social behaviors related to nurturing, language, and didactic behavior suggested that these mothers may be attempting to incorporate into their interactions with their infants behaviors that are valued in both their societies. Only Japanese American infants’ social behavior related to their exploratory behavior. Mother-infant interaction appears to be complementary across different cultural contexts. Another study longitudinally investigated parenting cognitions (attributions, self-perceptions) among Japanese American and South American mothers when children were five and 20 months old. Patterns of differences in the parenting cognitions of Japanese American and South American immigrant mothers appear to reflect traditional cultural beliefs about children and parenting. The cultural cognitions in mothers of both groups were largely stable, as were Japanese American mothers’ parenting cognitions. Central to a concept of culture is the expectation that different peoples possess different ideas as they behave in different ways with respect to childrearing. We compared Japanese American immigrant mothers’ parenting cognitions with those of both mothers in Japan and European American mothers in the United States; we also compared South American immigrant mothers’ parenting cognitions with those of both mothers in Argentina and European American mothers in the United States. Generally, South American immigrant mothers’ parenting cognitions more closely resembled those of mothers in the United States, whereas Japanese immigrant mothers’ cognitions tended to be similar to mothers in Japan or intermediate between Japanese and U.S. mothers. Japanese immigrant mothers’ parenting beliefs tended to be similar to those of mothers in Japan and to fall somewhere between those of Japanese and U.S. mothers. In contrast, South American immigrant mothers’ parenting beliefs were similar to those of U.S. mothers, suggesting that South American immigrant mothers more readily adopt U.S. parenting beliefs than Japanese immigrant mothers. One implication of our study is that immigrant mothers from different cultural groups do not necessarily share the child-rearing beliefs of mainstream U.S. parents. The study also suggests that researchers and others should not simply take generation level into account when attempting to understand immigrant parents, but also the country of origin. Bornstein MH, Cote LR. “Who is sitting across from me?” Immigrant mothers’ knowledge about children’s development. Pediatrics 2004;114:e557-564. Bornstein MH, Cote LR. Cultural and parenting cognitions in acculturating cultures: II. Patterns of prediction and structural coherence. J Cross-Cultural Psychol 2003;34:350-373. Bornstein MH, Cote LR. Mothers’ parenting cognitions in cultures of origin, acculturating cultures, and cultures of destination. Child Development 2004;75:221-235. Cote LR, Bornstein MH. Cultural and parenting cognitions in acculturating cultures: I. Cultural comparisons and developmental continuity and stability. J Cross-Cultural Psychol 2003;34:323-349. COLLABORATORS Jeffrey J. Arnett, PhD, University of Maryland, College Park, MD Martha E. Arterberry, PhD, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA Giovanna Axia, PhD, University of Padua, Padua, Italy Hiroshi Azuma, PhD, Shirayuri College, Tokyo, Japan Roger Bakeman, University of Georgia, Athens, GA Sashi Bali, PhD, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya Laura E. Caulfield, PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD Annick de Houwer, PhD, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium Janet A. DiPietro, PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD Celia Galperín, PhD, University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina Margaret Kabiru, PhD, Kenya Institute of Education, Nairobi, Kenya Sharone Maital, PhD, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Linda C. Mayes, MD, Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT Maria Lucia Moura de Seidl, PhD, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil A. Bame Nsamenang, PhD, The Institute of Human Sciences, Bamenda, Cameroon Misako Ogino, PhD, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan Liliana Pascual, PhD, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina Marie-Germaine Pêcheux, PhD, CNRS, Paris, France Alan Slater, PhD, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, PhD, New York University, New York, NY Suedo Toda, PhD, Hokkaido University of Education, Hokkaido, Japan Paola Venuti, PhD, Scienze e Tecniche di Psicologia Cognitiva Applicata, Treneto, Italy André Vyt, PhD, Catholic Institute of Health Care, Ghent, Belgium Shirley Wyver, PhD, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia For further information, contact bornstem@mail.nih.gov