CompletedNot Applicable

The Influence of Maternal Age, Employment Status, and Parenthood Status on Children's Cognitive Development

United States, Brazil, Cameroon2,355 participantsStarted 1988-02-17

Plain-language summary

Research and theory tend to agree when suggesting that certain activities done by mothers have both immediate and delayed consequences for children's mental development in the first years of life. The everyday interaction between an infant and a caregiver can be broken down into many categories. There are data linking both of these types of interaction to the mental development of children. The study will focus on the extent to which maternal characteristics (age, employment status, parenthood status, and birth order of the child) influence the relation between maternal social and didactic caregiving and the social and mental development of children. Mother-infant interaction will be observed when the infants are 5 months old. When the children are 20 months old, measures of toddler function (e.g., ability to play and language development) and maternal behavior (e.g., encouragement of attention to the environment and I.Q.) will be obtained. When the children are 48 months old, researchers will measure preschooler psychosocial functioning (e.g., I.Q., cognitive and social competencies) and maternal behavior (e.g., "scaffolding"). Understanding the relation between children's experiences as infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and their eventual intellectual and social functioning is an essential part of normal developmental research.\<TAB\>...

Who can participate

Age range5 Months – 23 Years

SexALL

See this in plain English?

AI-rewrites the medical criteria so a patient or caregiver can understand them. Always confirm with the trial site.

* INCLUSION CRITERIA: All subjects are normal volunteers. At initial recruitment, all mothers will be married women living in intact families with healthy, full-term, first-born infants. Most will be living in intact families. Prior to inclusion in the sample, basic demographic information will be obtained for all study participants including substitute caregivers but excluding school teachers. Variables include age, race, cultural background, primary language, marital status, SES (as assessed by the Hollingshead Four-Factor Index of Social Status, 1975), and educational level. In addition, for caregivers, information about their experience caring for children and about the peer environment, including the number of children routinely present, their sexes, and their ages, will be obtained. To the extent that the adolescent sample diverges from sample criteria with respect to marital status and SES, appropriate controls will be used. Subjects in the Argentine-American and Japanese-American project will be selected to represent families high vs low on appropriate measures of acculturation. The healthy second born infants of 80 mothers already enrolled in the protocol will also be recruited into the sample at the time of their birth. These infants will be selected to comprise four equal groups based on the gender composition of the sibling dyad: male/male, male/female, female/female, and female/male.

What they're measuring

Measures of child adaptive functioning

Timeframe: 5, 20,and 48 months, 10 years, 14 years, 18 years, and 23 years

Trial details

NCT IDNCT00361829

SponsorEunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

Sponsor typeNIH

Study typeOBSERVATIONAL