Parenting Matters Supporting Parents of Children Ages 0-8 (2016) / Chapter Skim
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2 Parenting Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices
2 Parenting Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices
Pages 45-100
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From page 45... ...
The chapter begins by defining desired outcomes for children that appear frequently in the research literature and inform efforts by agencies at the federal, state, and local levels to promote child health and well-being. It then reviews the knowledge, attitudes, and practices identified in the literature as core -- those most strongly associated with healthy child development -- drawing primarily on correlational and experimental s tudies.
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From page 46... ...
. Physical health and safety are fundamental for achieving all of the other outcomes described below.
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. Social Competence Children who possess basic social competence are able to develop and maintain positive relationships with peers and adults (Semrud-Clikeman, 2007)
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What parents learn through the practice of parenting can also be a source of knowledge and can shape parents' attitudes. Parenting attitudes are influenced as well by parenting self-efficacy, which has been broadly defined as the level of parents' self-belief about their ability to succeed in the parenting role (Jones and Prinz, 2005)
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As they suggest, to optimize children's development, parents need a basic understanding of infant and child developmental milestones and norms and the types of parenting practices that promote children's achievement of these milestones (Belcher et al., 2007; Benasich and Brooks-Gunn, 1996, p. 1187; Bond and Burns, 2006; Bornstein and Cote, 2004; Hess et al., 2004; Huang et al., 2005; Larsen and Juhasz, 1985; Mercy and Saul, 2009)
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From pregnancy, some don't know when to go to the doctor, and after birth, when to go to the hospital or the doctor. So we need education from the beginning to the end." -- Mother from Omaha, Nebraska The focus on parental knowledge as a point of intervention is important because parents' knowledge of child development is related to their practices and behaviors (Okagaki and Bingham, 2005)
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. Stronger evidence of the role of knowledge of child development in supporting parenting outcomes comes from intervention research.
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of randomized controlled trials and Middlemiss and colleagues (2015) of s tudies with various design types, with both groups reporting that increases in mother's knowledge about infant behavior is associated with positive changes in the home environment, as well as improvements in infant sleep time.
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found that parents who received educational information about child vaccinations via videotape as well as in written form showed greater gains in understanding about vaccinations than parents who received the information in written form alone. The evidence linking parental knowledge about the specific ways in which parents can help children develop cognitive and academic skills, including skills in math, is limited.
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Few causal analyses are available to test whether parenting attitudes actually affect parenting practices, positive parent-child interaction, and child development. Even less research exists on fathers' attitudes about parenting.
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At the same time, some studies identify differences in parents' goals for child development, which may influence attitudes regarding the roles of parents and have implications for efforts to promote particular parenting practices. While there is variability within demographic groups in parenting attitudes and practices, some research shows differences in attitudes and practices among subpopulations.
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. Research has shown that fathers of young children participate in child caregiving activities in increasing numbers (Cabrera et al., 2011)
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. And ethnographic research provides some evidence of differences in African American and European American mothers' beliefs about spoiling and in fant intentionality (whether infants can intentionally misbehave)
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found in a longitudinal study that higher breastfeeding self-efficacy predicted exclusive breastfeeding at 6 months postpartum, as well as better emotional adjustment of mothers in the weeks after giving birth. Parenting Practices Parenting practices have been studied extensively, with some research showing strong associations between certain practices and positive child outcomes.
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Practices to Promote Physical Health and Safety Parents influence the health and safety of their children in many ways. However, the difficulty of using random assignment designs to examine parenting practices that promote children's health and safety has resulted in a largely observational literature.
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. Nutrition and physical activity Parents play an important role in shaping their young children's nutrition and physical activity levels (Institute of Medicine, 2011; Sussner et al., 2006)
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Physical activity is a complement to good nutrition. Even in young children, physical activity is essential for proper energy balance and prevention of childhood obesity (Institute of Medicine, 2011; Kohl and Hobbs, 1998)
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Infants born to mothers who do not receive prenatal care or who do not receive it until late in their pregnancy are more likely than those born to mothers who receive such care early in pregnancy to be born premature and at a low birth weight and are more likely to die. Since the 1970s, there has been a decline in the number of women in the United States receiving late or no prenatal care, with the majority of pregnant women now receiving recommended prenatal care (Child Trends Databank, 2015a)
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Evidence that families' home safety practices affect child safety comes from intervention research. A large meta-analysis of randomized and nonrandomized controlled trials of home safety education interventions for families (Kendrick et al., 2013)
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. Parents help children develop these social skills through parenting practices that include fostering and modeling positive relationships and providing enriching and stimulating experiences and opportunities for children to exercise these skills (Landy and Osofsky, 2009)
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Brotman and colleagues (2005) found that a program designed to reduce parents' use of negative parenting and increase their provision of stimulation for child learning increased social competence with peers in young African American and Latino children who had a sibling who had been involved in the juvenile justice system.
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With respect to social competence, a number of studies point to a relationship with parenting practices and suggest that parent training may
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, for instance, found that parent training contributed to improved parenting practices, defined as lower negative parenting and increased parental stimulation for learning (Brotman et al., 2005) , which, in turn, are related to children's social competence.
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. Studies demonstrate that through shared book reading, young children learn, among other skills, to recognize letters and words and develop understanding that print is a visual representation of spoken language, develop phonological awareness (the ability to manipulate the sounds of spoken language)
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. Such experiences may facilitate children's math-related competencies, but compared with the research on strategies to foster children's language development, the evidence base on how parenting practices promote math skills in young children is small.
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Barbarin and Jean-Baptiste (2013) , for example, found that poor and African American parents employed dialogic practices less often than nonpoor and European American parents in a study that utilized in-home interviews and structured observations of parent-child interactions.
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. This give and take is particularly important for language development.
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. These and other interventions that successfully promote positive parent-child interactions, secure attachment, and healthy child development have been developed for parents of both infants (Armstrong and Morris, 2000)
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or factors related to economic strain (e.g., homelessness, poverty) that may make keeping routines difficult and at the same time adversely affect child development in other ways.
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Reviewing the cross-sectional and longitudinal literature on nonstandard work schedules, for example, Li and colleagues (2014) found that 21 of the 23 studies reviewed reported associations between nonstandard work schedules and adverse child developmental outcomes.
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In the long term, however, it may also lessen children's exposure to important aspects of socialization and, in turn, negatively affect their cognitive and socialemotional development. Emerging evidence suggests that the relationship between household chaos and poorer child outcomes may involve other aspects of the home environment, such as maternal sensitivity.
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. Effective discipline entails some of the parenting practices discussed earlier.
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In a systematic review of studies using randomized controlled, longitudinal, cross-sectional, and other design types, Larzelere and Kuhn (2005) found that, compared with other disciplinary strategies, physical punishment was either the primary means of discipline or was severe was associated with less favorable child outcomes.
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that in other studies have been found to be associated with negative child outcomes. Some have proposed that the circumstances in which physical discipline takes place (e.g., whether it is accompanied by parental warmth)
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Family systems theory offers a useful perspective from which to view parenting behavior, to understand what shapes it, and to explain its complex relation to child outcomes. As a system, the family operates according to an evolving set of implicit rules that establish routines, regulate behavior, legitimate emotional support and expression, provide for communication, establish an organized power structure or hierarchy, and provide for negotiating and problem solving so that family tasks can be carried out effectively (Goldenberg and Goldenberg, 2013)
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Research also indicates that parents with knowledge of evidence-based parenting practices, especially those related to promoting children's physical health and safety, are more likely than those without such knowledge to engage in those practices. Although there is currently limited empirical evidence on how parents' knowledge of available services affects uptake of those ser vices, parenting, and child outcomes, parents with this knowledge are likely better equipped to access services for their families.
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From page 81... ...
• The committee identified several parenting practices that are as sociated with improvements in the four domains introduced at the beginning of this chapter (physical health and safety, emotional and behavioral competence, social competence, and cognitive competence) : -- ontingent responsiveness (serve and return)
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. Nutrition and physical activity: Ran domized control trial in child care centers improves knowledge, policies, and children's body mass index.
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. Early Head Start: Factors associated with caregiver knowledge of child development, parenting behavior, and par enting stress.
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. Prevention for preschoolers at high risk for conduct problems: Immediate outcomes on parenting practices and child social competence.
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Child Development, 71(1)
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. A population-level approach to promoting healthy child development and school success in low-income, urban neighborhoods: Impact on parenting and child conduct problems.
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. Do specific parenting practices and related parental self-efficacy associate with physical activity and screen time among primary schoolchildren?
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. Child development and the physical environment.
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Child Development Perspec tives, 6(3)
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Child Development, 59(2)
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. Maternal knowledge of child development and quality of parenting among white, African-American and His panic mothers.
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. Parental monitoring in African American, single mother-headed families: An ecological approach to the identification of predictors.
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. The effects of knowledge of child development and social-emotional maturity on adolescent attitudes toward parenting.
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Early Child Development and Care, 182(10)
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. Use of videotaped interactions during pediatric well-child care to promote child development: A randomized, controlled trial.
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. Parenting Matters.
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Infant and Child Development [E-pub ahead of print]
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Child Development, 73(2)
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Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59(2-3)
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. Factors within the family environment such as parents' dietary habits and fruit and vegetable availability have the greatest influence on fruit and vegetable consumption by Polish children.
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