Early Childhood Care and Development Research in Africa: Historical, Conceptual, and Structural Challenges

Parents, Preschools, and the Developmental Niches of Young Children: A Study in Four Western Cultures

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to early childhood education and care as a foundation for children's successful development in school and beyond. The great majority of children in postindustrial societies now attend preschools or daycare, making this setting a major part of their culturally constructed developmental niches. Although an extensive literature demonstrates the importance of parental involvement or engagement in their children's schools, relationships between parents and their children's preschools have received scant attention in the research literature. This paper aims to address that gap through a mixed-methods cross-cultural study of parents and preschools in four Western countries: Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. Following an introduction to national systems of preschool in each country, parents' involvement and ideas about the family-school relationship are presented, drawing from parental diaries and from semistructured interviews (n = 110). Results indicate areas of cross-cultural similarity but also some differences, especially between the U.S. sample and the three European samples. Discussion addresses the question of how preschools and parents can work together to create optimal developmental niches for their young children. The authors also suggest that parent-preschool relationships deserve greater attention by both researchers and program developers.

Bringing the Real World Into Developmental Science: A Commentary on Weber, Fernald, and Diop (2017)

This article examines the parent intervention program evaluated by Weber et al. (2017) and argues that there are scientific and ethical problems with such intervention efforts in applied developmental science. Scientifically, these programs rely on data from a small and narrow sample of the world's population; assume the existence of fixed developmental pathways; and pit scientific knowledge against indigenous knowledge. The authors question the critical role of talk as solely providing the rich cognitive stimulation important to school success, and the critical role of primary caregivers as teachers of children's verbal competency. Ethically, these programs do not sufficiently explore how an intervention in one aspect of child care will affect the community's culturally organized patterns of child care.

CONTEXT AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF A GLOBAL SCIENCE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: A COMMENTARY

United Nations agencies mandated to address the needs of children around the developing (Majority) world, routinely create large global data sets mostly for purposes of surveillance and strategic planning of development aid. UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) have produced one of the largest sources of internationally comparable data on women and children. This monograph creatively and elegantly harnesses MICS data on 41 low- and middle-income countries to shed light on risk and protective factors associated with growing up a boy or girl in the developing world. In this commentary, I assess the monograph's contribution to the progress that our field must make toward greater geo-ecological and cultural inclusiveness of its knowledge base. I do so in the context of scholarship that is increasingly and justifiably questioning the relevance of mainstream developmental science outside the Euro-American world. I conclude that notwithstanding the limitations inherent in the data set, Bornstein, Putnick, Lansford, Deater-Deckard, and Bradley have done our field a great service by moving us further on a trajectory toward a more global science.

No data, no problem, no action: parenting programs in low-income countries. Making the social-emotional outcomes more visible

BACKGROUND

Parenting programs are delivered in many low income countries in an effort to address the effects of insufficient cognitive stimulation, major social-emotional risk factors related to inadequate caregiver sensitivity and responsiveness, maternal depression, violence and biological risk factors. However, the outcomes of these programs are often untested because of methodological limitations in the existing evaluation tools available for cross-cultural research, and especially those related to social-emotional development and functioning.

METHOD

This study takes an approach that involves organizing data from focus groups collected following caregiver participation in a parenting program, Learning Through Play (LTP) delivered in 11 low income countries. The LTP program has as its aim to increase parent knowledge and influence parental practice regarding the essential components of early development of children aged birth to 6 years. The purpose of systematically organizing focus group data was to illustrate a means by which program developers worldwide can discuss outcomes of program participation, particularly in social-emotional domains that have been overlooked in past studies on parenting programs.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

The findings from this study suggest that qualitative outcome data can be organized to make the social-emotional outcomes of participation in parenting programs more visible.