Faculty Bibliography

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether educational media as actually used by low-income families promotes parent-child cognitive stimulation activities. METHODS: Secondary analysis of the control group of a longitudinal cohort of mother-infant dyads enrolled post-partum in urban public hospital. Educational media exposure (via a 24-hour recall diary) and parent-child activities that may promote cognitive stimulation in the home (using StimQ) were assessed at 6, 14, 24, and 36 months. RESULTS: 149 mother-child dyads; 93.3% Latino. Mean (standard deviation) educational media exposure at 6, 14, 24, and 36 months was: 25 (40), 42 (58), 39 (49), and 39 (50) mins/day. In multilevel model analyses, prior educational media exposure had small positive relationship with subsequent total StimQ (beta=0.11, P=.03), but was non-significant (beta = 0.08, P = .09) after adjusting for confounders (child: age, gender, birth order, non-educational media exposure, language; mother: age, ethnicity, marital status, country of origin, language, depressive symptoms)Educational media did predict small increases in verbal interactions and toy provision (adjusted models, respectively: beta = 0.13, P = .02; beta = 0.11; P = .03). In contrast, more consistent relationships were seen for models of the relationship between prior StimQ (total, verbal interactions and teaching; adjusted models, respectively: beta = 0.20, P = .002; beta = 0.15, P = .006; beta = 0.20, P = .001) and predicted subsequent educational media. CONCLUSIONS: Educational media as used by this sample of low-income families does not promote cognitive stimulation activities important for early child development or activities such as reading and teaching.

OBJECTIVES/OBJECTIVE:Many children in low- and middle-income countries fail to reach their developmental potential. We sought to determine if a parenting program focused on the promotion of reading aloud enhanced parent-child interactions and child development among low-income families in northern Brazil. METHODS:This was a cluster-randomized study of educational child care centers randomly assigned to receive an additional parenting program (intervention) or standard child care without a parenting component (control). Parent-child dyads were enrolled at the beginning of the school year and were assessed at enrollment and at the end of the school year. Families in intervention centers could borrow children's books on a weekly basis and could participate in monthly parent workshops focused on reading aloud. We compared parents and children in intervention and control centers 9 months after the start of the intervention on measures of parent-child interaction and child language, cognitive, and social-emotional development. RESULTS:= 0.33). CONCLUSIONS:An innovative program focused on the promotion of parent-child reading aloud resulted in benefits to parent-child interactions and to child language and cognitive development that were greater than those provided by educational child care alone. This promising approach merits further evaluation at scale.

Parental engagement is critical to children's educational achievement. Before and during elementary school, it is crucial for parents to be involved in their children's education in order to foster development and achievement. Hispanic parents' immigrant status, coupled with a lack of English proficiency, means that they often find themselves of low socioeconomic status (SES). Being low SES also means that parents possess fewer resources for engaging with their children. The current study seeks to understand low-income, primarily Hispanic mothers' perceptions of their roles in their first grade children's education. Mothers were interviewed regarding parenting confidence related to teaching their children, and responses were analyzed using qualitative research methods. Mothers in this study associated their roles in their children's education with two primary areas: helping their children to learn, and raising their children to be well-behaved and respectful. The main barrier to parental confidence in these roles appeared to be mothers' lack of English proficiency. This is consistent with previous research demonstrating that Hispanic parents maintain the perception of a lack of proficiency in English as a significant barrier to parental involvement in their children's education in the United States. Future interventions with teachers and parents may benefit from these findings in consideration of the optimal ways to involve parent related to their perceived personal strengths regarding parental engagement.

We sought to determine impacts of a pediatric primary care intervention, the Video Interaction Project, on 3-year trajectories of parenting stress related to parent-child interactions in low socioeconomic status (SES) families. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted, with random assignment to one of two interventions (Video Interaction Project [VIP]; Building Blocks [BB]) or control (C). As part of VIP, dyads attended one-on-one sessions with an interventionist who facilitated interactions in play and shared reading through review of videotaped parent-child interactions made on primary care visit days; learning materials and parenting pamphlets were also provided to facilitate parent-child interactions at home. Parenting stress related to parent-child interactions was assessed for VIP and Control groups at 6, 14, 24, and 36 months using the Parent-Child Dysfunctional Interaction subscale of the Parenting Stress Index- Short Form, with 378 dyads (84%) assessed at least once. Group differences emerged at 6 months with VIP associated with lower parenting stress at 3 of 4 ages considered cross-sectionally and an 17.7% reduction in parenting stress overall during the study period based on multi-level modeling. No age by group interaction was observed, indicating persistence of early VIP impacts. Results indicated that VIP, a preventive intervention targeting parent-child interactions, is associated with decreased parenting stress. Results therefore support the expansion of pediatric interventions such as VIP as part of a broad public health strategy to address poverty-related disparities in school-readiness.

OBJECTIVES: As part of a large randomized controlled trial, the authors assessed the impact of 2 early primary care parenting interventions-the Video Interaction Project (VIP) and Building Blocks (BB)-on the use of physical punishment among low-income parents of toddlers. They also determined whether the impact was mediated through increases in responsive parenting and decreases in maternal psychosocial risk. METHODS: Four hundred thirty-eight mother-child dyads (161 VIP, 113 BB, 164 Control) were assessed when the children were 14 and/or 24 months old. Mothers were asked about their use of physical punishment and their responsive parenting behaviors, depressive symptoms, and parenting stress. RESULTS: The VIP was associated with lower physical punishment scores at 24 months, as compared to BB and controls. In addition, fewer VIP parents reported ever using physical punishment as a disciplinary strategy. Significant indirect effects were found for both responsive parenting and maternal psychosocial risk, indicating that the VIP affects these behaviors and risk factors, and that this is an important pathway through which the VIP affects the parents' use of physical punishment. CONCLUSION: The results support the efficacy of the VIP and the role of pediatric primary care, in reducing the use of physical punishment among low-income families by enhancing parent-child relationships. In this way, the findings support the potential of the VIP to improve developmental outcomes for at-risk children.

We studied associations between 2 pediatric primary care interventions promoting parental responsiveness and maternal depressive symptoms among low-income mothers. This randomized controlled trial included 2 interventions (Video Interaction Project [VIP], Building Blocks [BB]) and a control group. VIP is a relationship-based intervention, using video-recordings of mother-child dyads to reinforce interactional strengths. BB communicates with parents via parenting newsletters, learning materials, and questionnaires. At mean (SD) child age 6.9 (1.2) months, depressive symptoms were assessed with the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), parental responsiveness was assessed with StimQ-I. A total of 407 dyads were assessed. Rates of mild depressive symptoms were lower for VIP (20.6%) and BB (21.1%) than Controls (32.1%, P = .04). Moderate depressive symptoms were lower for VIP (4.0%) compared to Controls (9.7%, P = .031). Mean PHQ-9 scores differed across 3 groups (F = 3.8, P = .02): VIP mothers scored lower than controls (P = .02 by Tukey HSD). Parent-child interactions partially mediated VIP-associated reductions in depressive symptoms (indirect effect -.17, 95% confidence interval -.36, -.03).

Recent analyses have revealed that child-directed speech contains distributional regularities that could, in principle, support young children's discovery of distinct grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective). In particular, a distributional unit known as the frequent frame appears to be especially informative (Mintz, 2003). However, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the distributional information available in English. Because languages differ considerably in how the grammatical forms are marked within utterances, the scarcity of cross-linguistic evidence represents an unfortunate gap. We therefore advance the developmental evidence by analyzing the distributional information available in frequent frames across two languages (Spanish and English), across sentence positions (phrase medial and phrase final), and across grammatical forms (noun, verb, adjective). We selected six parent-child corpora from the CHILDES database (three English; three Spanish), and analyzed the input when children were aged 2 ; 6 or younger. In each language, frequent frames did indeed offer systematic cues to grammatical category assignment. We also identify differences in the accuracy of these frames across languages, sentences positions and grammatical classes.