The cultural context of infant development: Variability, specificity, and universality

Motor Development Comparison between Preterm and Full-Term Infants Using Alberta Infant Motor Scale

The Alberta Infant Motor Scale (AIMS) was developed to evaluate the motor development of infants up to 18 months of age. We studied 252 infants in three groups (105 healthy preterm infants (HPI), 50 preterm infants with brain injury (PIBI), and 97 healthy full-term infants (HFI) under 18 months, corrected age (CoA)) using AIMS. No significant differences were found among HPI, PIBI, and HFI in infants less than 3 months old, yet significant differences were noted in positional scores (p < 0.05) and total scores for those four to six months of age and seven to nine months of age. A significant difference was also found in standing items for infants over 10 months (p < 0.05). After four months, there was a difference in motor development between preterm (with and without brain injury) and full-term infants. In particular, there was a significant difference in motor development between HPI and HFI and between PIBI and HFI at four to nine months, when motor skills developed explosively (p < 0.05). After four months, motor developmental delays (10th ≥) were observed in HPI and PIBI at rates of 26% and 45.8%, respectively. Midline supine development, a representative indicator of early motor development, was slower even in healthy preterm infants than in full-term infants. AIMS has a good resolution to discriminate preterm infants who are showing insufficient motor development from 4 months to 9 months.

What is the expected human childhood? Insights from evolutionary anthropology

In psychological research, there are often assumptions about the conditions that children expect to encounter during their development. These assumptions shape prevailing ideas about the experiences that children are capable of adjusting to, and whether their responses are viewed as impairments or adaptations. Specifically, the expected childhood is often depicted as nurturing and safe, and characterized by high levels of caregiver investment. Here, we synthesize evidence from history, anthropology, and primatology to challenge this view. We integrate the findings of systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and cross-cultural investigations on three forms of threat (infanticide, violent conflict, and predation) and three forms of deprivation (social, cognitive, and nutritional) that children have faced throughout human evolution. Our results show that mean levels of threat and deprivation were higher than is typical in industrialized societies, and that our species has experienced much variation in the levels of these adversities across space and time. These conditions likely favored a high degree of phenotypic plasticity, or the ability to tailor development to different conditions. This body of evidence has implications for recognizing developmental adaptations to adversity, for cultural variation in responses to adverse experiences, and for definitions of adversity and deprivation as deviation from the expected human childhood.

A mediation meta-analysis of the role of maternal responsivity in the association between socioeconomic risk and children's language

This meta-analysis tested maternal responsivity as a mediator of the association between socioeconomic risk and children's preschool language abilities. The search included studies up to 2017 and meta-analytic structural equation modeling, allowed us to examine the magnitude of the indirect effect across 17 studies (k = 19). The meta-analysis included 6433 predominantly White, English speaking children (M_age  = 36 months; 50% female) from Western, industrialized countries. All paths in the model were statistically significant, notably, the indirect effect was significant (b = -.052), showing that maternal responsivity may be a proximal intervening variable between socioeconomic risk and children's language development. Moderator analyses found that the indirect effect was stronger for sensitive parenting than warmth and when parenting was assessed in the family home.

Studying caregiver-infant co-regulation in dynamic, diverse cultural contexts: A call to action

Caregivers and infants co-regulate their physiology, emotions, and behavior in a way that is dynamically responsive to each other and the contexts in which they live. This paper is an introduction and call to action for researchers interested in understanding how to study caregiver-infant interactions in the home and diverse cultural contexts, including marginalized communities. We argue that research will be more valid, culturally relevant, and tapped-in to the daily lives of caregivers and infants if there is partnership and collaboration with the caregivers in the design of the questions, data collection and analysis, and distribution of the findings. We recommend dynamically assessing emotions, behaviors, and physiology using repeated sampling methods including ecological momentary assessments (EMA), salivary bioscience, and actigraphy. We aim to extend current practices of studying caregiver-infant co-regulation by measuring fluctuations of daily life and considering sociocultural factors that shape naturalistic caregiver-infant interactions. Using methodological advancements and community-based participatory research approaches can enable developmental scientists to measure life as it is actually lived.

Speech and Language Outcomes in Low-SES Spanish-English Bilingual Preschoolers: The Role of Maternal Education

This paper presents a longitudinal examination of Spanish and English phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic abilities in 20 low-SES bilingual preschoolers with mothers who had either completed primary or secondary education in Spanish in their country of origin, Mexico. We focused on the link between maternal education and the following spontaneous production measures: 1) phonological accuracy as measured by Percent of Consonants Correct-Revised, 2) lexical variety as measured by Number of Different Words, and 3) utterance length as measured by Mean Length of Utterance in words; the relation between maternal education and spontaneous production was examined both a) at preschool entry, when children were on average 3;6 and dominant in Spanish, and b) a year later, after one year of exposure to the majority language (English) and culture. The results showed that although children of more educated mothers performed significantly better on all English measures than children of less educated mothers, maternal education was not related to Spanish outcomes. The same differences persisted a year later. These results suggest that maternal education may play a different, but long-lasting role in English compared to Spanish development possibly due to language input differences attributable to distinct cultural values and practices associated with different languages.