Effective parenting can significantly impact as infants begin to express themselves and understand information, and a growing body of research focusing on early childhood development indicates that training for parents is a valuable investment for enhancing outcomes in childhood.
Nonetheless, there may be a threshold to how much proficient parenting can enhance an infant’s language and cognitive abilities, particularly in circumstances where the family is experiencing substantial deprivation.
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis aimed to investigate how “prenatal social disadvantage,” infant brain volumes, and parenting influence cognitive and language skills. Prenatal social disadvantage describes the lack of resources necessary to fulfill a family’s fundamental needs. To accomplish this, they sourced participants from obstetric clinics in St. Louis to find pregnant individuals from a wide array of backgrounds.
They conducted follow-ups with around 200 new mothers and their infants at 1 and 2 years of age to perform observations of parenting as well as assessments of language and cognition. Their findings revealed that prenatal social disadvantage correlates with reduced cognitive and language scores and that nurturing parenting actions could enhance those measures — although only to a certain extent.
The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, provides insights into how to increase the effectiveness of prenatal and early childhood initiatives.
Researcher Deanna Barch describes “social disadvantage” as a continuum of how extensively a family’s financial requirements are being met. Barch is vice dean for research and a professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, as well as the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine.
If basic necessities such as consistent housing, nutrition, and insurance are secured, “then parenting can indeed make a difference,” Barch remarked. “However, if these fundamental needs aren’t satisfied, that’s likely what constrains cognition, and parenting doesn’t have the chance to exert a positive influence.”
Nurturing parenting may not be sufficient to counteract the “impact” that deprivation inflicts on an infant’s brain development. The findings can assist in crafting social initiatives that focus on prenatal care and parental training.
First author Shelby Leverett, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at WashU Medicine, noted their initial surprise at the results because much existing literature indicates that parenting skills can serve as an effective intervention target, yet many of those conclusions may arise from a more limited, advantaged demographic on the “social disadvantage” spectrum.
“It’s crucial that we work to support families so we can eradicate disadvantage and give children the opportunity to develop optimally,” Leverett stated.
Leverett SD, Grady RG, Tooley UA, Lean RE, Tillman R, Wilson J, Ruscitti M, Triplett RL, Alexopoulos D, Gerstein ED, Smyser TA, Warner B, Luby JL, Smyser CD, Rogers CE, Barch DM. Associations between Parenting and Cognitive and Language Abilities at 2 Years of Age Depend on Prenatal Exposure to Disadvantage. J Pediatr. Epub 2024 Sep 2 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2024.114289.
This research received funding from R01MH113883, K01MH122735, T32NS121881, and T32MH100019 from the NIH, the March of Dimes Foundation, grant MI-II-2018-725 from the Children’s Discovery Institute, grant P50 HD103525 from the Washington University Intellectual and Developmental Disability Research Center, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia & Depression Young Investigator Grant 28521 from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and grant KL2 TR00234.
The article Good parenting helps, but has limits under major deprivation originally appeared on The Source.