Reaching population-level impact for families in poverty requires moving beyond a sole focus on individuals, to a wider focus on interactions between individuals and their broader environmental ...contexts. Place-based initiatives have emerged as a policy response to promote community-level change around these broader interactions between individuals and their local communities through addressing long-standing disparities in housing, employment, education, and health. Together Growing Strong (TGS) is one such place-based initiative focused on transforming the health, wellbeing, and development of young children and their families in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Children, Caregivers, and Community (C3) Study is an outcomes-based study designed to assess the trajectories of children and families in Sunset Park along indicators such as family health and wellbeing and child development in relation to TGS program participation. The aims, scope, and protocol of the C3 Study are the subjects of this paper.
•Construing nature as created may not solely derive from religious enculturation.•Religious believers and non-believers judged whether entities were purposefully made or not.•Under speed, both groups ...showed a default tendency to judge nature as purposefully made by some being.•Understanding nature as created is rooted in everyday cognitive biases.
Do non-religious adults – despite their explicit disavowal of religious beliefs – have a tacit tendency to view nature as purposefully created by some being? This question was explored in three online studies using a speeded judgment procedure, which assessed disbelievers in two different Western cultures (United States and Finland). Despite strong performance on control trials, across all three studies non-religious individuals displayed a default bias to increasingly judge pictures of natural phenomena as “purposefully made by some being” under processing constraints. Personal beliefs in the supernatural agency of nature (“Gaia beliefs”) consistently predicted this tendency. However, beliefs in nature as purposefully made by some being persisted even when such secular agency beliefs were controlled. These results suggest that the tendency to view nature as designed is rooted in evolved cognitive biases as well as cultural socialization.
Considerable evidence demonstrates the importance of the cognitive home environment in supporting children's language, cognition, and school readiness more broadly. This is particularly important for ...children from low-income backgrounds, as cognitive stimulation is a key area of resilience that mediates the impact of poverty on child development. Researchers and clinicians have therefore highlighted the need to quantify cognitive stimulation; however existing methodological approaches frequently utilize home visits and/or labor-intensive observations and coding. Here, we examined the reliability and validity of the StimQ2, a parent-report measure of the cognitive home environment that can be delivered efficiently and at low cost. StimQ2 improves upon earlier versions of the instrument by removing outdated items, assessing additional domains of cognitive stimulation and providing new scoring systems. Findings suggest that the StimQ2 is a reliable and valid measure of the cognitive home environment for children from infancy through the preschool period.
Infants learn and develop within an ecological context that includes family, peers, and broader built and social environments. This development relies on proximal processes—reciprocal interactions ...between infants and the people and environments around them that help them understand their world. Most research examining predictors of proximal processes like parent-child interaction and parenting has focused on elements within the home and family. However, factors like the neighborhood built environment may also exhibit an influence, and may be particularly critical in infancy, as socioeconomic disparities in cognition and language emerge early in life. Moreover, influence from the built environment could independently exacerbate these disparities, as research indicates that neighborhood impacts may be especially relevant for families living in neighborhoods that have experienced disinvestment and therefore have been under-resourced. The current study examines these questions by determining the association of neighborhood vacancy rate and observed physical disorder—indicators of poverty, residential stability, and long-term structural discrimination—with parental cognitive stimulation among predominantly Black/African-American families in Flint, Michigan. Flint is particularly salient for this study because vacancy rates and disinvestment vary widely across the city, driven by its long-time status as a city struggling economically. Regression analyses controlling for caregiver education, mental health, and social support indicated that vacancy rate and physical disorder negatively predicted parental cognitive stimulation. Moreover, there were significant interactions between the built environment and social support, indicating that, particularly for parent-child shared reading, vacancy rate and physical disorder predicted reduced shared reading only when parents had limited social support. These results have important implications for public policy around vacant property demolition and neighborhood reinvestment programs, as they indicate that the neighborhood built environment is associated with parenting behaviors that have important impacts on infants’ learning and development.
The goal of this study was to determine what effects pediatric primary care interventions, focused on promotion of positive parenting through reading aloud and play, have on the socioemotional ...development of toddlers from low-income, primarily immigrant households.
This randomized controlled trial included random assignment to 1 of 2 interventions (Video Interaction Project VIP or Building Blocks BB) or to a control group. Mother-newborn dyads were enrolled postpartum in an urban public hospital. In VIP, dyads met with an interventionist on days of well-child visits; the interventionist facilitated interactions in play and shared reading through provision of learning materials and review of videotaped parent-child interactions. In BB, parents were mailed parenting pamphlets and learning materials. This article analyzes socioemotional outcomes from 14 to 36 months for children in VIP and BB versus control.
A total of 463 dyads (69%) contributed data. Children in VIP scored higher than control on imitation/play and attention, and lower on separation distress, hyperactivity, and externalizing problems, with effect sizes ∼0.25 SD for the sample as a whole and ∼0.50 SD for families with additional psychosocial risks . Children in BB made greater gains in imitation/play compared with control.
These findings support the efficacy of VIP, a preventive intervention targeting parent-child interactions, for enhancing socioemotional outcomes in low-income toddlers. Given the low cost and potential for scalability of primary care interventions, findings support expansion of pediatric-based parenting programs such as VIP for the primary prevention of socioemotional problems before school entry.
Many books for young children present animals in fantastical and unrealistic ways, such as wearing clothes, talking and engaging in human-like activities. This research examined whether ...anthropomorphism in children's books affects children's learning and conceptions of animals, by specifically assessing the impact of depictions (a bird wearing clothes and reading a book) and language (bird described as talking and as having human intentions). In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw picture books featuring realistic drawings of a novel animal. Half of the children also heard factual, realistic language, while the other half heard anthropomorphized language. In Study 2, we replicated the first study using anthropomorphic illustrations of real animals. The results show that the language used to describe animals in books has an effect on children's tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and that anthropomorphic storybooks affect younger children's learning of novel facts about animals. These results indicate that anthropomorphized animals in books may not only lead to less learning but also influence children's conceptual knowledge of animals.
This study examined the interrelated and longitudinal impacts of parent-child shared book reading, parenting stress, and early relational health, as measured by both parental warmth and parent ...sensitivity, from infancy to toddlerhood. To extend findings from previous studies of collateral effects that have been conducted in parenting interventions, we examined parenting behaviors in a broader context to determine whether shared book reading would confer collateral benefits to the parent and parent-child relationship beyond those expected (i.e., language and literacy). It was hypothesized that positive parent-child interactions, such as shared reading, would have positive impacts on parent outcomes such as parenting stress, parental warmth, and sensitivity. The sample consisted of 293 low-income mothers and their children who participated in a randomized controlled trial. Shared book reading, parenting stress, and parental warmth were assessed when children were 6 and 18 months old. We computed a series of cross-lagged structural equation models to examine longitudinal interrelations among these three factors. Results indicated that shared book reading at 6 months was associated with increases in observed and reported parental warmth and observed sensitivity and decreases in parenting stress at 18 months, controlling for baseline risk factors and treatment group status. These findings suggest that early parent-child book reading can have positive collateral impacts on parents' stress and the parent-child relationship over time.
To determine impacts on social-emotional development at school entry of a pediatric primary care intervention (Video Interaction Project VIP) promoting positive parenting through reading aloud and ...play, delivered in 2 phases: infant through toddler (VIP birth to 3 years VIP 0-3) and preschool-age (VIP 3 to 5 years VIP 3-5).
Factorial randomized controlled trial with postpartum enrollment and random assignment to VIP 0-3, control 0 to 3 years, and a third group without school entry follow-up (Building Blocks) and 3-year second random assignment of VIP 0-3 and control 0 to 3 years to VIP 3-5 or control 3 to 5 years. In the VIP, a bilingual facilitator video recorded the parent and child reading and/or playing using provided learning materials and reviewed videos to reinforce positive interactions. Social-emotional development at 4.5 years was assessed by parent-report Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition (Social Skills, Attention Problems, Hyperactivity, Aggression, Externalizing Problems).
VIP 0-3 and VIP 3-5 were independently associated with improved 4.5-year Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition T-scores, with effect sizes (Cohen's d) ∼-0.25 to -0.30. Receipt of combined VIP 0-3 and VIP 3-5 was associated with d = -0.63 reduction in Hyperactivity (
= .001). VIP 0-3 resulted in reduced "Clinically Significant" Hyperactivity (relative risk reduction for overall sample: 69.2%;
= .03; relative risk reduction for increased psychosocial risk: 100%;
= .006). Multilevel models revealed significant VIP 0-3 linear effects and age × VIP 3-5 interactions.
Phase VIP 0-3 resulted in sustained impacts on behavior problems 1.5 years after program completion. VIP 3-5 had additional, independent impacts. With our findings, we support the use of pediatric primary care to promote reading aloud and play from birth to 5 years, and the potential for such programs to enhance social-emotional development.
To determine the early impacts of pediatric primary care parenting interventions on parent cognitive stimulation in low socioeconomic status families and whether these impacts are sustained up to 1.5 ...years after program completion.
This randomized controlled trial included assignment to 1 of 2 interventions (Video Interaction Project VIP or Building Blocks) or to a control group. Mother–newborn dyads were enrolled postpartum in an urban public hospital. In VIP, dyads met with an interventionist on days of well-child visits; the interventionist facilitated interactions in play and shared reading through provision of learning materials and review of videotaped parent–child interactions. In Building Blocks, parents were mailed parenting pamphlets and learning materials. We compare the trajectories of cognitive stimulation for parents in VIP and control from 6 to 54 months.
There were 546 families that contributed data. VIP was associated with enhanced reading, parent verbal responsivity, and overall stimulation at all assessment points, with analyses demonstrating a 0.38 standard deviation increase in cognitive stimulation overall. Trajectory models indicated long-term persistence of VIP impacts on reading, teaching, and verbal responsivity.
VIP is associated with sustained enhancements in cognitive stimulation in the home 1.5 years after completion of the program and support expansion of pediatric interventions to enhance developmental trajectories of children of low socioeconomic status.
Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT00212576.
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