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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 |
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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 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). 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). Bornstein MH, Bradley RH,
eds. Socioeconomic Status, Parenting,
and Child Development. 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. 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. 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, After 52 months’ acculturation, South American
mothers in the 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 Bornstein MH, Bornstein MH, Bornstein MH, 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, Martha E. Arterberry, PhD, Giovanna Axia, PhD, Hiroshi Azuma, PhD, Roger Bakeman, Sashi
Bali, PhD, Kenyatta University,
Nairobi, Kenya Laura E. Caulfield, PhD, The Annick de Houwer, PhD, Janet A. DiPietro, PhD, The Celia Galperín, PhD, Margaret Kabiru, PhD, Kenya Institute of Education, Sharone Maital, PhD, 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 Misako Ogino, PhD, Liliana
Pascual, PhD, University of Buenos
Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina Marie-Germaine
Pêcheux, PhD, CNRS, Paris, France Alan Slater, PhD, Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, PhD,
Suedo Toda, PhD, Paola
Venuti, PhD, Scienze e Tecniche di
Psicologia Cognitiva Applicata, Treneto, Italy André Vyt, PhD, Catholic Institute of Health Care, Shirley Wyver, PhD, For further information, contact bornstem@mail.nih.gov |