The early home environment and developmental outcomes for young children in the child welfare system

The quality of the early home environment is predictive of young children's subsequent cognitive, academic, and behavioral functioning. Limited research has focused on the effects of the early caregiving environment on the functioning of young children involved with the child welfare system. This study investigated the influence of children's home environments (i.e., number of children in the home, number of moves the child experienced, level of cognitive stimulation, and level of emotional support) during the first 2 years of life on their preschool developmental outcomes (i.e., cognition, language, social skills, and behavior problems).As anticipated, a high-quality early home environment promoted the well-being of preschool children who had entered the child welfare system as infants. Children who lived with greater numbers of children incurred more compromised cognitive, language, behavioral, and social outcomes. No significant associations emerged between the total number of placements and developmental outcomes; children who remained in the same home during infancy (typically the birth family home) had more compromised developmental outcomes in every domain except behavioral problems.Both cognitive stimulation and emotional support in the home predicted higher cognitive and language scores, decreased behavioral problems, and increased social skills. Early out-of-home placement and lack of emotional support interacted to predict children's behavioral problems. These findings are considered in the context of extant research and policy relevant to young children in the child welfare system.     

Infancy and Childhood in India: A Critical Review

Empirical studies of childhood in India have been rare. Guided by universalistic theories of child development, developmental psychologists have seldom examined cultural variations in child-rearing patterns with Indian samples. Psychoanalytic studies of Hindu childhood have been influenced by therapeutic observations with segmented middle-class populations that are generally Westernized and educated, inviting a lively debate about the transferability of psychoanalytic individualism to non-Western contexts. Anthropological studies, invariably focused on cultural variation, have not searched for consistent cultural patterns in ethnographic materials on Hindu socialization. Based on fieldwork conducted in a village near Delhi, this article presents one of the first systematic quantitative and ethnographic studies of patterns of child care in Hindu extended families during the preschool years. The findings are discussed in terms of achieving a consensus between developmental, psychoanalytic, and anthropological observations of Indian childhood.     

Infants' Sensitivity to Manipulations of Maternal Touch During Face-to-Face Interactions*

Forty-eight mothers and their 5.5-month-olds participated in a series of face-to-face interactions consisting of a Normal plus three still-face (SF) periods where mothers could touch their infants (SF with touch). The primary objective was to determine whether young infants are sensitive to subtle changes in maternal touch. Variations in infants' affective and attentional responses were revealed as a function of the different periods; infants smiled more when mothers were requested to maximize their smiling using touch alone, and gaze shifted from mothers' faces in the Normal period to their hands in the SF with touch periods. Results imply that: (1) infants are sensitive to subtle changes in their mothers' touching, (2) mothers are effective in using touch to elicit specific infant responses, (3) touch-only interactions are positive, as reflected in infants' gaze and affective displays, (4) mothers use consistent types of touch when touching specific areas of their infants' bodies during brief interactions.