Maternal Stimulation Level and Intervention

Abstract

Home environment provided by the parents, parental behavior, their interaction with the child and other related factors such as socio personal and economic factors tend to influence the development of children though the degree of influence may vary. The social and physical home environment variables are uniquely related to the development of young children. Age trends showed that the highest correlations between environment and development tended to be found during the preschool years. To assess the stimulation provided to children by mothers, Mohite’s Home Environment Inventory was used on 120 mothers from four villages of Hisar district of Haryana state. Control-Experimental group and Pre-Post test design was used to find out the impact of intervention programme used for enhancing maternal stimulation level. As observed, the mean scores of both the groups were almost similar for all the five aspects and the overall maternal stimulation also at the initial stage. The differences also came out to be non significant statistically showing that children in both the study groups had almost similar stimulation environment at Pre-testing stage. The results of post test after introduction of experimental group mothers with the intervention programme revealed that the mean scores of experimental group were higher than those of control group. These differences in mean scores of control and experimental group were found significantly higher in favor of experimental group. The mean score of control group mothers was 8.20 whereas, in experimental group it was as high as 16.73 at Post-testing stage showing the efficacy of the intervention programme.