Lucia Tramonte

Maternal Depression, Family Functioning and Children's Longitudinal Development

Analysis of data from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth reveals that 6% of children are born to mothers who experienced symptoms of depression during their first 2 years of life. The prevalence rises steadily until children are 10 years of age when it reaches 9%, and thereafter remains relatively stable. Children of depressed mothers are at increased risk of having low receptive vocabulary and displaying inattention or physical aggression at ages 4 to 5 years, only partially attributable to family demographic factors, family functioning and parenting qualities. Maternal depression occurring when the child was 2 to 3 years of age, was a risk factor for anxiety in 10 and 11 year olds. Timing or duration of maternal depression had no effect on math achievement. The risk of poor child outcome was greatest for mothers who experienced depression continuously or when their child was 2 to 3 years or older. Nurses need to assess and intervene to reduce the impact of depression on mothers and their childrens development, well beyond the postpartum period.

Free-viewing laterality tasks: a multilevel meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE Chimeric free-viewing laterality tasks have been used extensively as measures of right-hemisphere functioning, with many variations in stimuli and samples typically showing an LVF bias. However, the questions remain concerning whether the LVF bias is significantly different from zero, and what factors might moderate this bias. METHOD The present meta-analysis answered these questions by retrieving a presumably exhaustive sample of studies published in English that involved free viewing of stimuli. The final analysis was based on 329 effect sizes drawn from 112 published studies. A hierarchical linear model (or multilevel) approach to meta-analysis was used to deal with the violation of the independence of effect-sizes assumption and to reflect better the hierarchical structure of the data. RESULTS A large and significant left visual-field (LVF) bias (estimated mean d = 1.024) was demonstrated across the entire set of retrieved effect sizes. It was also demonstrated that such tasks are a useful tool for discriminating between various clinical populations. Finally, the moderator analysis identified that emotion faces (estimated mean d = 1.052) and timed conditions (estimated mean d = 1.319) appear to promote large effects. CONCLUSIONS The present meta-analysis validated free-viewing laterality tasks as tools for neuropsychological assessment and for empirical research.

Engagement and Guidance: The Effects of Maternal Parenting Practices on Children’s Development

Problems with inattention, physical aggression, and poor cognitive skills when children enter school can have long-term negative effects on their development. In this study, we address the issues of whether and how parental engagement and guidance are related to children’s behavioral and cognitive problems throughout elementary school. The analyses are based on data from nearly 10,000 children aged 6 to 11 years followed longitudinally in the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Results were obtained through the multilevel modeling of children’s growth trajectories. We purposefully limited our analyses to the parenting practices of the biological mothers of children from intact families. Our analyses indicate positive relationships between engagement and guidance with children’s cognitive and behavioral development at age 6 as well as over time. These relationships are evident even after controlling for family socioeconomic characteristics; however, they differ with children’s gender and the outcome considered.

Anxiety and Emotional Discomfort in the School Environment: The Interplay of School Processes, Learning Strategies, and Children's Mental Health

Children and adolescents try to look strong and beautiful to their peers, deal with the pressure to succeed in sports, achieve good grades, and develop positive and lasting relationships. School is the place where children spend most of their daily hours, trying to meet these challenges while they define their identities. Consequently, experiences at school influence every aspect of development during childhood and adolescence, ranging from the construction of their intellectual capital to their emotional and physical well-being to the establishment of peer and child-adult relations (Eccles & Roeser, 2011).