Claire D. Vallotton

Developmental Pathways to Integrated Social Skills: The Roles of Parenting and Early Intervention.

Dynamic skill theory was utilized to explain the multiple mechanisms and mediating processes influencing development of self-regulatory and language skills in children at 14, 24, and 36 months of age. Relations were found between family risks, parenting-related stresses, and parent-child interactions that contribute either independently or through mediation to the childs acquisition of self-regulatory skills even when accounting for the influence of language development. Variation in impacts between control and Early Head Start (EHS) intervention samples was compared to explore the sequence of developmental mechanisms over time. Findings indicate that EHS protects parenting, child language, and self-regulatory development from the effects of demographic risks and parenting stress, and thus supports parents to raise healthy children.

Parents' Communication Decision for Children with Hearing Loss: Sources of Information and Influence.

Choosing a method of communication for a child with hearing loss is a complex process that must occur early to prevent developmental consequences. Research shows that parents’ decisions are influenced by professionals; parental attitudes and knowledge also may be influential. The present study investigated additional influences on parents’ choices; data were collected via an online survey (N = 36). Results indicated no effects of parents’ knowledge of development on their communication choices, but did indicate an effect of parents’ values and priorities for their children. Further, parents who chose speech only received information from education or speech/audiology professionals more often. However, there were no group differences in sources parents cited as influential; all parents relied on their own judgment. Results suggest that parents internalize the opinions of professionals. Thus, accurate information from professionals is necessary for parents to make informed decisions about their children’s communication.

The effect of Early Head Start on child welfare system involvement: A first look at longitudinal child maltreatment outcomes☆

The high societal and personal costs of child maltreatment make identification of effective early prevention programs a high research priority. Early Head Start (EHS), a dual generational program serving low-income families with children prenatally through age three years, is one of the largest federally funded programs for infants and toddlers in the United States. A national randomized trial found EHS to be effective in improving parent and child outcomes, but its effectiveness in reducing child maltreatment was not assessed. The current study used administrative data from state child welfare agencies to examine the impact of EHS on documented abuse and neglect among children from seven of the original seventeen programs in the national EHS randomized controlled trial. Results indicated that children in EHS had significantly fewer child welfare encounters between the ages of five and nine years than did children in the control group, and that EHS slowed the rate of subsequent encounters. Additionally, compared to children in the control group, children in EHS were less likely to have a substantiated report of physical or sexual abuse, but more likely to have a substantiated report of neglect. These findings suggest that EHS may be effective in reducing child maltreatment among low-income children, in particular, physical and sexual abuse.

Early Intervention for Children With Hearing Loss: Information Parents Receive About Supporting Children’s Language

Family-centered early intervention for children with hearing loss is intended to strengthen families’ interactions with their children to support children’s language development, and should include providing parents with information they can use as part of their everyday routines. However, little is known about the information received by families via early intervention and whether this aligns with recommended practices. This study used in-depth interviews to examine parents’ reports of information received from early intervention service providers about how to promote the language development of their children with hearing loss. Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns in the information parents received. The information parents receive is partially in line with current recommended practices, such as the importance of frequent communication with their children during everyday activities. However, parents also discussed the need for additional unbiased and specific information about how to promote their children’s language skills.

Attachment Predicts College Students' Knowledge, Attitudes, and Skills for Working with Infants, Toddlers, and Families.

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Adults’ attitudes about attachment relationships are central to how they perceive and respond to children. However, little is known about how attachment styles are related to teachers’ attitudes toward and interactions with infants and toddlers. From a survey of 207 students taking early childhood (EC) courses at 4 U.S. universities, we report relations among students’ attachment styles and their (a) career goals, (b) attitudes about caring for and educating infants and young children, and (c) interaction skills for responding in developmentally supportive ways. Overall, attachment security was positively associated with career goals focused on working with younger children, knowledge about infant/toddler development, attitudes that acknowledge the importance of adult support in children’s development, and developmentally supportive interaction skills. Students who scored high on attachment fearfulness minimized the importance of adults in children’s lives, minimized the importance of the early years for later learning, and endorsed strict and controlling forms of child guidance. Practice or Policy: A conceptual mediation model linking a path from attachment to caregiving skill through knowledge and attitudes is articulated. We propose a person-centered pedagogy for infant/toddler professional preparation that provides opportunities for reflection on one’s own attachment and its effects on work with young children.

Spending time with others: A time-use diary for infant-toddler child care

This chapter focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ experiences of the social and physical world as they occur in their everyday lives in child care. Our study of daily life in child care began by selecting a methodology that would capture the child’s day in its entirety. The approach we chose was time-use diary (TUD), a research method most typically used in the social sciences (Gershuny J, Sullivan O, Eur Sociol Rev 14(1):69–85, 1998) to record a person’s activities as they naturally and sequentially occur in daily life. In designing a TUD for infant-toddler child care, we aimed to collect a detailed, complete and accurate estimate of the time children spent in different activities and interactions with educators and other children across the entire day. A process of continuous observation was developed to record ‘what the child is doing’, ‘where the child is’ and ‘who the child is with’. TUDs were collected in child care centres and family day care homes for 25 children who ranged in age from 5 to 24 months. By applying different analytical tools to the data, we were able to calculate summary totals for the amount of time children spent in different activities or with different people, as well as producing visual patterns to depict how children’s use of time changed across the day.

Early home learning environment predicts children’s 5th grade academic skills

ABSTRACT We examined whether the early learning environment predicts children’s 5th grade skills in 2,204 families from ethnically diverse, low-income backgrounds; tested the mediating roles of children’s pre-kindergarten school-related skills and later learning environment; and asked whether lagged associations generalize across White, Black, Hispanic English-speaking, and Hispanic Spanish-speaking samples. Children’s early learning environment comprised measures of literacy activities, the quality of mothers’ engagements with children, and learning materials assessed at 14 months, 2 and 3 years, and at pre-kindergarten; learning environments were again assessed in 5th grade. At pre-kindergarten and in 5th grade, children were assessed on pre-academic and academic skills respectively. Early learning environments predicted children’s 5th grade academic skills, and children’s pre-kindergarten skills and 5th grade learning environment mediated longitudinal associations. The early learning environment supports the emergence of pre-academic skills that are stable into early adolescence, and pathways generalize across ethnic/racial groups.

Preparing home visitors to partner with families of infants and toddlers

ABSTRACT Home visitors provide individualized services to families of infants and young children in their homes. Due to their unique role, home visitors must develop a specialized set of critical competencies—specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes. They therefore require preparation that differs in distinct ways from the preparation typically available to those who will teach young children in classrooms. This article outlines key considerations for higher education programs preparing the home visiting workforce. We present a comprehensive framework of competencies for home visitors and identify empirically supported knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for effectively working with parents who are adult learners from diverse backgrounds, who face their own unique challenges, and who nearly always have strong emotions about their children and their parenting. Using the competencies as a guide, we propose three major recommendations for higher education to ensure adequate preparation for home visitors who serve families with infants and toddlers—(1) interdisciplinary coursework, (2) cross-sector integration of students in child development courses, and (3) multiple home visiting experiences with a range of families.

Influences on U.S. Higher Education Programs Educating the Infant-Toddler Workforce

In this paper we introduce the Collaborative for Understanding the Pedagogy of Infant/toddler Development (CUPID), a multi-disciplinary group of more than 50 scholars across 28 U.S. colleges and universities who have joined together in a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) effort to understand how to better support the professional needs of the infant/toddler workforce. One of the goals of CUPID is to make visible key issues faced by institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the U.S. in addressing the training of the infant/toddler workforce. Challenges facing those in higher education include the U.S. policy context, and the federal and state structures for supporting and credentialing the infant/toddler workforce. This work is made more challenging by the historical context of the field, and by the changing views on the goals for early care and education including the call for increased educational qualifications for teachers.

U.S. and Chilean Mothers’ Use of Mental References With Infant Girls and Boys: Comparison of Maternal Practices in Gender Socialization via Language in Two Countries

Variability in parents’ socialization of gender across countries has been understudied. To address the gap, this study compares U.S. and Chilean mothers’ practices in socialization of gender through use of mental state language. Drawing on 90 Chilean and 52 U.S. mother–infant dyads, we examined variation in the frequencies of mothers’ utterances of five types of mental references—emotion, desire, physiological states, causal talk, and cognition—to determine whether they varied by country and infant gender. Infant age ranged between 10 and 15 months. The frequencies with which both U.S. and Chilean mothers in our sample talked about most mental references did not vary according to infant gender, with the exceptions of causal talk in the United States. Specifically, the U.S. mothers used more causal talk with girls than boys. There were more similarities than differences in maternal use of the mental references in the U.S. and Chilean samples. This study did not observe gendered socialization practices through the use of these mental references in infancy among the U.S. and Chilean mothers. Instead, the current study suggests that, using mothers’ mental references in the child’s first year as the indicator, both gender-neutral and cross-gendered socialization practices emerge in the United States, and only gender-neutral socialization practices emerge in Chile.