No abstract

This study examines sources of individual variation in child vocabulary competence in the context of a multivariate developmental ecological model. Maternal sociodemographic characteristics, personological characteristics, and vocabulary, as well as child gender, social competence, and vocabulary competence were evaluated simultaneously in 126 children aged 1;8 and their mothers. Measures of child vocabulary competence included two measures each of spontaneous speech, experimenter assessments, and maternal reports. Maternal measures, from proximal to distal, included vocabulary, verbal intelligence, personality, attitudes toward parenting, knowledge of parenting, and SES. Structural equation modelling supported several direct unique predictive relations: child gender (girls higher) and social competence as well as maternal attitudes toward parenting predicted child vocabulary competence, and mothers' vocabulary predicted child vocabulary comprehension and two measures of mother-reported child vocabulary expression. In addition, children's vocabulary competence was influenced indirectly by mothers' vocabulary, social personality, and knowledge of child development. Maternal vocabulary itself was positively influenced by SES, maternal verbal intelligence, and mothers' knowledge about parenting. Individual variation in child vocabulary competence might best be understood as arising within a nexus of contextual factors both proximal and distal to the child.

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.

This study investigated and compared ideas about parenting in Argentine, Belgian, French, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, and U.S. mothers of 20-month-olds. Mothers evaluated their competence, satisfaction, investment, and role balance in parenting and rated attributions of successes and failures in 7 parenting tasks to their own ability, effort, or mood, to difficulty of the task, or to child behavior. Few cross-cultural similarities emerged; rather, systematic culture effects for both self-evaluations and attributions were common, such as varying degrees of competence and satisfaction in parenting, and these effects are interpreted in terms of specific cultural proclivities and emphases. Child gender was not an influential factor. Parents' self-evaluations and attributions help to explain how and why parents parent and provide further insight into the broader cultural contexts of children's development.

This study evaluates sources of individual variation in child pretense play as an expression of emerging mental representation. Family sociodemographic characteristics, maternal personological characteristics, and maternal affective and cognitive play behaviors, as well as children's gender, language competence, and play, were examined simultaneously. Naturalistic child solitary play and child collaborative play with mother were videorecorded in 141 20-month-olds. Child solitary play, child-initiated and mother-initiated collaborative play with mother, and maternal demonstrations and solicitations of play were then coded into nonsymbolic and symbolic acts. Zero-order relations obtained between child play and, respectively, child gender and language, family SES, and maternal verbal intelligence, personality, physical affection, and play demonstrations and solicitations. Structural equation modeling supported the following unique predictive relations: Child language and mothers' symbolic play positively influenced child collaborative play, and child gender and mothers' verbal intelligence predicted child solitary play. Child gender and mothers' verbal intelligence and physical affection influenced mothers' play and so influenced child collaborative play indirectly. The cognitive advantages of child play and maternal influences on child play are placed in an adaptive parenting framework.

The present study compared Argentine (N = 39) and U.S. (N = 43) children and their mothers on exploratory, symbolic, and social play and interaction when children were 20 months of age. Patterns of cultural similarity and difference emerged. In both cultures, boys engaged in more exploratory play than girls, and girls engaged in more symbolic play than boys; mothers of boys engaged in more exploratory play than mothers of girls, and mothers of girls engaged in more symbolic play than mothers of boys. Moreover, in both cultures, individual variation in children's exploratory and symbolic play was specifically associated with individual variation in mothers' exploratory and symbolic play, respectively. Between cultures, U.S. children and their mothers engaged in more exploratory play, whereas Argentine children and their mothers engaged in more symbolic play. Moreover, Argentine mothers exceeded U.S. mothers in social play and verbal praise of their children. During an early period of mental and social growth, general developmental processes in play may be pervasive, but dyadic and cultural structures are apparently specific. Overall, Argentine and U.S. dyads utilized different modes of exploration, representation, and interaction--emphasizing "other-directed" acts of pretense versus "functional" and "combinatorial" exploration, for example--and these individual and dyadic allocentric versus idiocentric stresses accord with larger cultural concerns of collectivism versus individualism in the two societies.

This study assesses whether the stresses associated with parenting a child are indirectly related to adolescent self-concept through parenting behaviors. We examined longitudinal associations among mothers' and fathers' parenting stress at age 10, children's perceptions of parenting at age 10, and adolescents' self-concept at age 14 in 120 European American families. Mothers' and fathers' parenting stress was related to children's perceptions of acceptance and psychologically controlling behavior, and psychologically controlling behavior (and lax control for fathers) was related to adolescent self-concept. We further examined which domains of parenting stress and perceived parenting behaviors were associated with adolescents' scholastic competence, social acceptance, physical appearance, and behavioral conduct. Parenting stress was related to specific parenting behaviors, which were, in turn, related to specific domains of self-concept in adolescence. Parenting stress appears to exert its effects on early adolescent self-concept indirectly through perceived parenting behavior. KeywordsParenting Stress; Parenting Behavior; Self-concept; Adolescence Although parenting is rewarding for most parents (Rogers & White, 1998), parenting a child provides ever-changing challenges as the child grows and develops. Parenting stress (also called childrearing stress) can be attributed to the behavior of the child, to parental difficulty in managing parenting tasks, or to dysfunctional interaction between child and parent (Abidin, 1995). Parenting stress is experienced across all sociodemographic groups and many contexts (Crnic & Low, 2002). In this article, we explore processes by which parenting stress plays a role in children's perceptions of parenting behaviors and how those perceived parenting behaviors then influence children's self-concept during the psychologically vulnerable period of the transition into adolescence.Self-concept (broadly defined as encompassing self-esteem and self-perceptions) is a major component of well-being that has been linked to overall life satisfaction (Diener, 1984;Myers & Diener, 1995), positive emotions (Mahon & Yarcheski, 2002), and protection against anxiety and depression (Ohannessian, Lerner, Lerner, & von Eye, 1994 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript concept as our outcome for two specific reasons beyond these global relations between selfconcept and well-being. First, self-concept appears to decline across late childhood and early adolescence (Baldwin & Hoffmann, 2002). Second, in adolescence, self-concept becomes increasingly differentiated (Harter, 2006), and adolescents' self-concepts in different domains are conceptually and statistically independent (Harter, 1988). Measuring only global selfconcept ignores important variations in emotional, academic, social, and behavioral domains of self-concept (see DuBois & Tevendale, 1999). The ability to assess self-concept across multiple domains is especially significant for adolescents who ar...

This study evaluated whether motor activity prior to birth is predictive of motor behavior and temperament in neonates, infants, and toddlers. Three measures of fetal motor activity (activity level, amplitude, and number of movements) were collected at 24, 30, and 36 weeks of gestation in 52 healthy fetuses using Doppler-based actography. Postnatal data collection included a neurobehavioral assessment at 2-weeks postpartum (n = 41), and laboratory-based behavioral observations at 1 and 2 years of age (ns = 35). Individual stability in motor activity was present during gestation. Predictive relations between fetal movement and neonatal behavior were inconsistent; significant but small positive associations were detected between motor behavior at 36 weeks and neonatal irritability and motor development. Fetal activity level at 36 weeks was positively associated with observed 1-year activity level for boys (but inversely related for girls) and maternal report of activity level at 2 years. Fetal movement was consistently and negatively predictive of distress to limitations at 1 year and behavioral inhibition at 2 years, accounting for 21 to 43% of the variance in these measures. Intrafetal variability in motor behavior makes this a relatively unstable metric for prediction to neonatal maturational outcomes, which are relatively constrained, but fetal motor activity appears to predict temperament attributes related to regulatory behaviors in early childhood.