Parental practices and beliefs on motor development in the first year of life

Abstract

Introduction:In the child's first year of life, motor development is critical for the other areas of child development. Beliefs and parenting practices influence the parents' care and encouragement of their children, reflecting in their motor development; however, the Brazilian literature on this subject is scarce. Objective: to characterize the parental practices and beliefs associated with motor development in the first year of life; and to verify if practices and beliefs are interrelated. Methods: Two questionnaires were developed and applied, one about parenting practices and the other about parental beliefs on motor development in the first year life, to 27 caregivers of children between 12 and 24 months of age, who participated in an aquatic stimulation program. The agreement between practices and beliefs was verified by a graphical method, based on the transformation of ordinal scores to an interval scale using Rasch analysis. Results: The participants had higher levels of education and economic status. They reported a variety of practices focused on the motor development of their children, such as family interaction through playing, toy offers, lap time and free movement space. Conclusion: Most of the practices were based on parental beliefs, for some activities, however, beliefs and practices diverged, demonstrating the complexity inherent to the formation of parental beliefs.

Two Cultural Models on Infant Motor Development: Middle Class Parents in Israel and the Netherlands

“…Furthermore, infants whose parents held stronger beliefs about the importance of stimulation and used more practices that support prone position showed higher levels of prone skills. Finding a beliefs-behavior relation regarding specific motor activities, is also in agreement with a recent retrospective study conducted in Brazil showing that the importance parents attributed to specific motor activities (i.e., their attitude) was mostly related to the activities parents did with their infants (Gomes et al, 2017). Taken together, our findings about the differences in the settings and parental practices and the links between beliefs and practices, combined with our previous findings about differences in parental beliefs (Van Schaik et al, 2018), show a system of culturally aligned beliefs, settings and practices.…”

“…While in prone position children can more easily change position by means of rolling or crawling. These findings about the differences in settings and practices that support prone position skills are in line with other studies reporting cross-cultural differences in parental choices for placing children in prone position (Harkness et al, 2007;Carmeli et al, 2008;Zachry and Kitzmann, 2011;Gomes et al, 2017). Moreover, these differences in settings and practices are in line with the hypotheses as they fit with the more general cultural models of both countries.…”

“…While on the one hand empirical work provides some support for the relation between the settings and practices of care and motor development, on the other hand, studies show that motor practices and habits of care vary across cultures (e.g., Adolph et al, 2010;Gomes et al, 2017). For example, practicing standing and sitting, and applying massage or stretching of the limbs is common in African and Caribbean cultures but less common in Western cultures (for reviews see, Adolph et al, 2010;Super and Harkness, 2015).…”

Milestones or Millstones: How Standard Assessments Mask Cultural Variation and Misinform Policies Aimed at Early Childhood Development

“…Parents’ expectations inform how infants should be handled, where they should be placed, and how much agency they should be allowed in their daily lives. Moreover, parents have culture-specific expectations about what skills infants should acquire and when and adjust their practices to meet those expectations (Gomes et al, 2017; Oudgenoeg-Paz et al, 2020). It is in the context of these handling practices caregivers evaluate the health and wellbeing of their babies and whether they are developing according to their cultural expectations.…”

Factors Influencing the Quality of Life and Nutritional Status of 0-2 Years Old Children

“…These findings are congruent with a study on Brazilian parenting practices, which discovered that mothers with higher education and economic status organized more activities to promote their children's motor development, such as playing, toy, lap time, and free movement space. 33 Child-rearing practice predicted the QoL of children aged 0 to 2 years. According to the study, parents over the age of 36 offered adequate nutrition, hygiene, and developmental care than younger parents.…”