|
Smart Start Sitters stays on the leading edge of child development research.
Excerpts From Child Development
Teacher-Child Ties
How important are the relationships between children and their
teachers during the early school years? Drawing on data on almost
1,400 children who took part in the longitudinal NICHD Study of Early
Child Care and Youth Development, Maldonado-Carreno and Votruba-Drzal
(p. 601) examined whether the quality of those relationships is
associated with changes in how children do academically as well as in
their behavior from kindergarten through fifth grade. Based on reports
from teachers and mothers, the researchers find that the better the
relationship between teachers and students, the less likely the
children were to have behavior problems throughout elementary
school. Their findings regarding academics are more mixed, but suggest
general improvements in academic skills in language/literacy and math
as a function of good teacher-student ties. And the results did not
change as children made their way from kindergarten through fifth
grade, suggesting that the influence of the relationships continues
across elementary school.
Mood and Interactions
How do teens' social experiences relate to their moods in everyday
life? Flook (p. 454) asked an ethnically diverse group of almost 600
American ninth graders to fill out daily diaries for 2 weeks,
reporting on their moods as well as their interactions with parents
and peers. The study finds that there is a two-way relation between
the youths' social experiences and their moods. Put another way, when
something good happens, teens are more likely to be happy, and when
they're happy, they are more likely to find that things go well for
them; the same applies to negative feelings and experiences. What's
more, good events can balance out negative ones-the more positive
social events teens report, the more positive their mood, even on days
when negative events happen. The study also finds that while both
genders experience more negative moods on days that could be
characterized as rotten, the effect is better for females.
Parenting Antisocial Adolescents
Williams and Steinberg (p. 633) examined the impact of parenting
across a 3-year period among more than 1,300 teens (most of them male)
aged 14-17 who had been convicted of felonies. Findings: Teens did
well when their parents were warm and not hostile. Predictably,
parents became warmer and less hostile in response to positive
development in their children, and less warm in response to their
teens' problematic behaviors. Teens whose parents monitored their
activities improved in some areas, but worsened in others. And parents
pulled back from their monitoring when their teens showed either
positive or problematic behavior. This longitudinal study confirms
that parents and teens (both younger and older adolescents) are
influenced by the others' behavior, and it provides ideas for
interventions to help parents of antisocial adolescents.
Thinking and Seeing Outside the Box
Abstract reasoning, the ability to reason logically about something
without real-world knowledge, is difficult and usually doesn't
show up until late adolescence. In three studies involving about 850
Canadian and British children, Markovits and Lortie-Forgues (p. 646)
looked at conditional (if-then) reasoning in an attempt to determine
why it's so difficult to move from simple concrete reasoning to
abstract reasoning. Findings: Asking children and adolescents to
reason with false premises in a fantasy context improves their ability
to reason abstractly. In contrast, reasoning with true premises in a
realistic context does not affect their abstract reasoning
abilities. These studies also show a clear developmental pattern: 6-
and 7-year-old children aren't able to reason logically with
false premises, but this ability is pretty well developed by the time
they're 9-11. This suggests that a key part of understanding
abstract reasoning is being able to think "outside the box,"
critically pondering things that are false or imaginary, something
that's not necessarily promoted by reasoning about things that
are familiar.
Previous research has shown that between ages 4 and 5, children
understand that objects look different from different perspectives,
that is, that others may see things in a different way than they
do. In two experiments, using a new color-filter technique, Moll and
Meltzoff (p. 661) tested the visual abilities of 36-month-olds. By age
3, the researchers conclude, children have a grasp of how others see
things when this differs from how they themselves see them. The
results may suggest that this type of perspective taking develops
earlier than traditionally assumed, and as such, have implications for
theories of social cognition.
Verbal Leaps
Young children have trouble applying a newly learned verb to another
event that involves the same action by a different object. For
example, a child who has just learned the verb wave while seeing
someone wave a flag is reluctant to extend the same meaning to another
event in which someone is waving a handkerchief. In two studies
involving more than 100 Japanese 3- and 4-year-olds, Haryu, Imai, and
Okada (p. 674) find that young children have a better chance of
understanding the meaning of the verb when they get help extending its
meaning, and when that help comes from the use of an object that is
perceptually similar and involves action that is the same as the
action involved when the child first learned the verb. Successfully
extending a verb to the same action with support from a similar
object-and repeated experience doing so-provides children with an
opportunity to compare the events to which the same verb can be
applied. The findings contribute to our understanding of how children
build expertise in learning words, especially verbs.
Family Communication
Children with developmental delays often experience social
difficulties, but it's not always clear why. Fenning, Baker, and
Juvonen (p. 717) used a new method to evaluate parent-child
conversations to find that typically developing children generally
engage in more complex talk about feelings with their parents than
children with developmental delays. They also come up with more
adaptive solutions to challenging social situations and exhibit better
social skills. But the study also finds that for both typically
developing children and those with developmental delays, the way
parents and children talk about their feelings contributes to
children's social reasoning skills, which in turn predict how well
kids do socially. The study, of almost 150 families of 8-year-olds
with and without developmental delays, also finds that limitations in
the quality of conversations about feelings may help explain why
children with delays don't do as well socially as their
typically developing peers. By suggesting that family conversations
about emotions may set the stage for children's emerging social
reasoning, the findings can inform intervention and treatment
efforts.
|
|
