Parental Input Research Articles

The Economics of Parenting

Parenting decisions are among the most consequential choices that people make throughout their lives. Starting with the work of pioneers such as Gary Becker, economists have used the tool set of their discipline to understand what parents do and how parents’ actions affect their children. In recent years, the literature on parenting within economics has increasingly leveraged findings and concepts from related disciplines that also deal with parent–child interactions. For example, economists have developed models to understand the choice among various parenting styles that were first explored in the developmental psychology literature and have estimated detailed empirical models of children's accumulation of cognitive and noncognitive skills in response to parental and other inputs. In this review, we survey the economic literature on parenting and point out promising directions for future research.

Working with the parents and families of children with developmental language disorders: An international perspective

BackgroundThe relationship between parental input and child language development has had a complex history. It has become clear that indirect parent training for the parents of children with delayed language development is an important feature of interventions offered by speech and language therapists in the anglophone countries. Yet we know less about how this type of approach is realised in other countries. MethodsIn this paper we report the results of a survey of practice undertaken as part of the work of COST Action IS1406, a European Union (EU) funded research network. The focus of this paper is specifically on parent-related questions and responses referring to children under the age of twelve. The survey was devised by members of the Action and circulated electronically during the summer of 2017. In all, 4024 practitioners responded from 60 countries, the majority of whom came from EU member countries. FindingsRespondents to the survey indicated that indirect therapy is commonly carried out via the parent in the early years and via teachers later. A range of professional groups, in addition to speech and language therapists, is likely to adopt this approach; including teachers, pedagogues and psychologists. A variety of interventions is reported, some of which have a reasonable evidence-base underpinning them. It is interesting to see the widespread involvement of fathers and other family members in interventions. Finally, the fact that practitioner characteristics (age, experience, location of practice etc.) are not related to the use of indirect techniques points to the universal recognition of the value of these approaches. ConclusionsDespite the very different traditions in the practice of intervention across countries, there is clearly a widespread recognition of the importance of indirect approaches to intervention and specifically those focusing on parents. The mixture of family members being involved in interventions is a very promising indication of the role sharing commonly associated with the contemporary family. Yet the number of specific intervention approaches identified is relatively small given the number of respondents. There is a need for a better understanding of what exactly practitioners are doing when they involve parents in intervention or carry out parent-child interaction interventions and how well these interventions work in routine practice. This also has implications for the application of evidence-based practice and the precise nature of the interventions concerned (advice to parents, video interaction training etc.).

Oral Food Challenge Implementation: The First Mixed-Methods Study Exploring Barriers and Solutions

Because of inaccuracies in commonly used tests for food allergy, oral food challenges (OFCs) are considered the criterion standard, but OFC implementation is suboptimal. To use a mixed-methods approach to describe OFC barriers at multiple levels and investigate solutions. Surveys of Canadian allergists, pediatricians, and parents investigated barriers to offering or participating in OFCs, and possible solutions. Parent focus groups were held to understand these barriers and solutions. Allergist offices in British Columbia were contacted via telephone to confirm their OFC practices. Of 62 responding allergists, 80.6% reported performing OFCs, 72.6% reported lack of resources as an influential barrier, and 72.6% reported that creation of standard guidelines for hospital versus community OFCs would influence them to perform more OFCs. Of 101 responding pediatricians, 51.5% reported having moderate-to-extensive OFC knowledge; these pediatricians were more likely to refer to allergists who performed them (odds ratio, 2.37; 95% CI, 1.06-5.30). Of 27 pediatricians who stated they refer more to allergists who do not perform OFCs, 40.7% reported long wait times as a deterrent. The most common parent barriers from surveys (N= 110) and focus groups (N= 27) were fear and anxiety about the procedure and about experiencing reactions during OFCs, suggesting the need for better information and psychosocial resources. Multiple barriers prevent widespread use of OFCs. Efforts targeting OFC training for allergists, education for pediatricians, and standardized guidelines created with clinician and parent input (including consistent OFC information for families and guidance on which OFCs should be performed in-hospital versus the community) are likely to increase OFC acceptance.

Do Students Learn More When Studying with Similar Students? Evidence from Korean High Schools

This paper examines the effects of high school de-tracking on Korean SAT scores. After accounting for the sample selection bias using an event study approach with matching, we identify three distinct channels of de-tracking effects: classroom effects from peer quality and teaching effectiveness, campus effects from school facilities and resources, and supplement effects from parental inputs. We find that de-tracking reduces the test scores for each subject by 0.05-0.09 of one standard deviation, and that classroom effects are the most important. The negative classroom effect is primarily driven by teaching effectiveness (i.e., teacher-student match quality), and the effect heterogeneity comes mostly from peer quality changes. We also find that the negative effect of de-tracking is the strongest for students at the top percentiles of the score distribution and the part of classroom effects is mitigated by supplementary effects for the parents of students at the top percentiles of the score distribution.

2400-PUB: Assessment of Parental Preparedness for Transition of Their Child’s Diabetes Care from Pediatric to Adult Providers

Background: Youth with diabetes and their parents are not prepared for transition to adult care. Several studies suggest that transition planning should start early, however, the role for parental input in this process is not well defined. At our center, we are working on implementing a transition readiness class to better prepare our families for transition care to adult providers. Parents were administered a standardized questionnaire (Gottransition.org) to assess their perspectives on their child’s transition readiness. Results: Of the parents of 19 youth (13M, 6F; 11 on pumps, 8 on multiple daily injections (MDI)) only 37% felt confident about their child’s transition preparedness while nearly all (84%) felt it was important for their child to prepare for the transition before age 22. Table 1 shows the parental assessment of their child’s healthcare navigation and autonomy. Discussion: While there is recognized importance for improving transition preparedness amongst diabetic youth, parents have poor confidence in their child’s ability to do so, which was found to be even lower in patients on MDI than on a pump. Parents believe there is need for education particularly on healthcare navigation and autonomy. These findings support the need for implementation of a formal curriculum to educate diabetic youth on specific healthcare navigation elements before transitioning to adult providers. Disclosure K.R. Shank: None. M. Reall: None. K. Bangalore Krishna: None.

Entrenchment and productivity: The role of input in the code-mixing of a German-English bilingual child

AbstractThis paper investigates the role of input in the code-mixing (CM) of a German-English bilingual child between the age of 2;3 until 3;11. Supporting a usage-based approach to linguistic theory, multiword units are shown to play an important role in language acquisition scenarios, both in the input children receive as well as in their own early language production.The current study combines findings from Child-directed-speech (CDS) and children’s output to investigate whether utterance-initial, multiword units in the code-mixing of a German-English bilingual child can be traced back to patterns found in the input.The findings reveal that a large proportion of the child code-mixed (78%) and parental input (59%) data instantiate the selection of multiword units. Additionally, we found that many of the units used by the child (74%) correlate with units in the parental input suggesting that bilingual children construct their code-mixed utterances on the basis of both concrete lexical strings and partially schematic patterns they have heard before.

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

AbstractUsing the lenses of bilingualism and social justice, I reflect on relevant conceptual and methodological issues encountered in the study of the linguistic development of heritage language speakers. Themes examined include the early but varying timing of heritage language learning; the surrounding linguistic environment, including the link between parental input and linguistic outcomes and heritage language speakers’ bilingualism, multilingualism, and multilectalism; the framing of literacy in the minority language; and the unique and language‐shaping experience of minoritization, often an outcome of immigration. I argue that bilingualism is gradient and that better measurement of relevant variables—particularly those related to timing, input/exposure, and literacy—can invigorate the study of heritage language development and make new and more robust insights possible. I propose that heritage speakers and their languages must be understood as connected to minoritized communities and to the experience of inequitable multilingualism.

“Tell it as it is”: How Sisom prompts children and parents to discuss their cancer experience

AbstractBackgroundSisom is an interactive computerized tool shown to improve communication between children with cancer and their clinicians in Norway. Concerns that Sisom may prompt disclosure of potentially distressful symptoms during a busy clinical day may deter implementation in practice in other settings.AimThe purpose of this study was to describe the questions, concerns, and comments that unfolded between children and their parents during the children's use of Sisom within a research context.MethodsA secondary analysis of qualitative interview transcripts derived from the interactions of 39 children with cancer aged 6 to 13 years with Sisom from two previous studies was performed. Thirty‐one of these interactions had at least one parent present during testing. Data were coded and analyzed using content analysis techniques involving an iterative process of data reduction, display, conclusion drawing, and verification.ResultsSisom elicited a verbal response to at least one symptom in the majority of children (n = 33, 85%) and prompted at least one input in 23 of the parents (74%). Sisom prompted children to (1) discuss their thoughts and feelings out loud, (2) categorize their symptoms as pleasant or unpleasant, and (3) reflect on their illness experiences with varying degrees of certainty. Parental input consisted of (1) providing clarification, (2) validating their child's responses, (3) guiding their child's responses, (4) responding on behalf of their child, and (5) making jokes or casual remarks.ConclusionSisom prompts children to discuss their thoughts and illness experiences with their parents and to express their emotions. Sisom may be a useful tool to enhance the communication between children with cancer and their parents and clinicians, which may help them express their needs in the health care setting.

Child nominal derivation and parental input: Evidence from morphology-rich Russian

The purpose of current article is to describe the early phases of first language acquisition of nominal derivatives in morphology-rich Russian approaching an ideal inflecting-fusional language type. The results are based on the naturalistic longitudinal observations of two typically developing monolingual children (1;5–3;0) growing up in middle socio-economic status families (33 hours of recorded spontaneous speech). It has been revealed that derivation morphology, viz. affixation, starts to develop early and precedes compounding. Within nouns, suffixation is the main method of word-formation. Prefixation and mixed methods are rare. Although nouns can be formed from almost any grammatical classes, they are mainly formed from nouns in child speech. Early compounds can be described as right-headed endocentric ones where their main component is a noun or a verb. The preference for certain patterns and models rarely differs in child speech corpora. Both children have similar development of semantic categories and only a few innovations. The morpheme and semantic (cognitive) complexity of nominal derivatives in child speech increase by the end of the observation period. The influence of parental input is significant for the mechanisms of derivation morphology acquisition. This is confirmed by the presence of a positive correlation for both lemmas and tokens of nominal derivatives. The most frequent patterns in parental input are acquired by a child earlier.

Parent Perspectives of Their Involvement in IEP Development for Children With Autism

The present study investigated parents’ experiences in making educational decisions for their children with autism and their satisfaction with said outcomes. Parents completed a survey describing (a) their input in educational decisions, (b) satisfaction with school personnel, and (c) satisfaction with their child’s school experience. Sequential regressions revealed parents’ satisfaction was generally predicted by their own knowledge of autism, school staff knowledge of autism, parent satisfaction with teachers, and parent relationships with school personnel. In addition, parent input was a significant predictor of satisfaction with their child’s school experience. Finally, open-ended responses indicated that parents experienced many barriers when working with schools and often felt compelled to go outside of the school system to ensure their children received an appropriate education. Implications for teacher preparation and school–parent partnerships are described.

Parental Linguistic Input and Its Relation to Toddlers' Visual Attention in Joint Object Play: A Comparison Between Children with Normal Hearing and Children With Hearing Loss.

Parent-child interactions are multimodal, often involving coordinated exchanges of visual and auditory information between the two partners. The current work focuses on the effect of children's hearing loss on parent-child interactions when parents and their toddlers jointly played with a set of toy objects. We compared the linguistic input received by toddlers with hearing loss (HL) and their chronological age-matched (CA) and hearing age-matched (HA) normal-hearing peers. Moreover, we used head-mounted eye trackers to examine how different parental linguistic input affected children's visual attention on objects when parents either led or followed children's attention during joint object play. Overall, parents of children with HL provided comparable amount of linguistic input as parents of the two normal-hearing groups. However, the types of linguistic input produced by parents of children with HL were similar to the CA group in some ways and similar to the HA group in other ways. Interestingly, the effects of different types of linguistic input on extending the attention of children with HL qualitatively resembled the patterns seen in the CA group, even though the effects were less pronounced in the HL group. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the reciprocal, dynamic, and multi-factored nature of parent-child interactions.

Mastering the Grammar of Complex Events: Evidence from Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds

ABSTRACTThe Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., tui dao “push fall” and pa shang “climb ascend”) encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we focused on children’s production of RVCs with two infixes, -bu- “not able” and -de- “be able.” Because the infixes intervene between the two verbs of RVC (e.g., tui -bu- dao “push -not able- fall” and tui -de- dao “push -be able- fall”), being able to produce RVC infixation indicates that children have a morphological separation between the action and the result verbs. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 is a corpus analysis. We examined the use of plain RVCs versus RVCs with infixes in parent input and children’s spontaneous speech using a cross-sectional corpus and a longitudinal corpus. RVCs with infixes were found to be very rare in both parent input and child production. Study 2 is an experimental elicitation task targeting RVC infixation. Children between 3;0 and 5;0 performed exceptionally well, producing target responses when primed with structurally related probes in discourse-appropriate contexts. There was no difference in children’s performance related to age or the type of infix (i.e., -bu- vs -de-). Children’s early competence with RVC infixation, which is infrequent in input, runs counter to the usage-based approach that emphasizes item-based learning. Rather, by age three, Mandarin-speaking children have developed a representation of the RVC as two distinct morphemes for encoding complex event structure. This representation facilitates acquisition of the infixes with very little input data.

The effects of parent coaching on language outcomes at 18 and 24 months: A randomized controlled trial

The prevalence of parentese in speech directed to 11- and 14-month-old infants predicts infants’ concurrent babbling as well as their future language skills at 24 months, suggesting that this speaking style may enhance learning. We recently showed that when parents are “coached” about the importance of language input to infants, and parentese, they increase the proportion of parentese and child-directed speech. This has an immediate and positive effect on child language outcomes at 14 months. In the present study, we asked whether the effects of coaching parents extend to longer-term language outcomes. Families of typically developing 6-month-old infants were assigned to Intervention (parent coaching) and Control (no coaching) groups. Parent coaching took place when infants were 6- 10-, 14- and 18-months of age, and included quantitative and qualitative linguistic feedback derived from each family’s first-person LENA recordings at home. Language outcomes were measured at 18- and 24-months of age. Parent coaching significantly enhanced the percentage of child-directed speech and parentese in parental input between 6 and 18 months in coached vs. uncoached parents. Children of parents who received coaching showed enhanced language outcomes at 18 and 24 months.

Infants' statistical word segmentation in an artificial language is linked to both parental speech input and reported production abilities.

Individual variability in infant's language processing is partly explained by environmental factors, like the quantity of parental speech input, as well as by infant-specific factors, like speech production. Here, we explore how these factors affect infant word segmentation. We used an artificial language to ensure that only statistical regularities (like transitional probabilities between syllables) could cue word boundaries, and then asked how the quantity of parental speech input and infants' babbling repertoire predict infants' abilities to use these statistical cues. We replicated prior reports showing that 8-month-old infants use statistical cues to segment words, with a preference for part-words over words (a novelty effect). Crucially, 8-month-olds with larger novelty effects had received more speech input at 4months and had greater production abilities at 8months. These findings establish for the first time that the ability to extract statistical information from speech correlates with individual factors in infancy, like early speech experience and language production. Implications of these findings for understanding individual variability in early language acquisition are discussed.

The Economics of Parenting

Parenting decisions are among the most consequential choices people make throughout their lives. Starting with the work of pioneers such as Gary Becker, economists have used the toolset of their discipline to understand what parents do and how parents' actions affect their children. In recent years, the literature on parenting within economics has increasingly leveraged findings and concepts from related disciplines that also deal with parent-child interactions. For example, economists have developed models to understand the choice between various parenting styles that were first explored in the developmental psychology literature, and have estimated detailed empirical models of children's accumulation of cognitive and noncognitive skills in response to parental and other inputs. In this paper, we survey the economic literature on parenting and point out promising directions for future research.

Do school inputs crowd out parents’ investments in their children?

Many countries around the world are making substantial and increasing public investments in children by providing resources for schooling from early years through to adolescence. Recent research has looked at how parents respond to children’s schooling opportunities, highlighting that public inputs can alternatively encourage or crowd out parental inputs. Most evidence finds that parents reduce their own efforts as schooling improves, dampening the efficiency of government expenditure. Policymakers may thus want to focus government provision on schooling inputs that are less easily substituted.

Parental Inputs and Socio-Economic Gaps in Early Child Development

By the time children start school, socio-economic gaps are evident in child skills. We document a causal effect of a reform to mothers' education on her child's skills and use mediation analysis to explore the role of parental inputs as mechanisms. The reform shifted mothers' education from no, to a low level of qualifications. Our results suggest that financial resources are an important channel, explaining up to 59% of the effect on child cognitive skills. On top of this, parental investments of health behaviours during pregnancy and monetary investments at home explain a further 14% of the test score gaps.

Parent-Child Conversations About Biological Kinds as a Potential Contributor to the Variability in Biological Knowledge

Abstract There is a growing body of research on variability in the early development of biological knowledge. Most of the studies focus on the variability related to culture and direct exposure to nature, however, there is also data suggesting that parental input plays an important role. In children’s first years of life, parents play a key role in scaffolding development. It is therefore very important to provide a detailed account of how parents contribute to children’s understanding of living things, and how they convey biological knowledge through everyday conversations. The present article provides a review of the literature on variability in biological knowledge and parent-child conversations about biological kinds. It also presents original data from parent-child interactions while viewing picture books. Eighteen parent-child dyads who differed in the level of parental expertise within biology, talked while viewing books containing 24 photographs of animals and plants. The speech analysis specified labeling, perceptual and conceptual descriptions, relational, and mentalistic talk. Parents also completed a questionnaire on the child’s interests. The results showed that biology expert families produced more content overall, and a higher proportion of relational content than lay families. The findings help elucidate the specific role parents have in shaping children’s early biological understanding. In particular, I discuss the role of relational language in shaping children’s ontological commitments.

Child Socio-Emotional Skills: The Role of Parental Inputs

Informed by the psychological literature and our empirical evidence we provide new insights into the technology of socio-emotional skill formation in middle childhood. In line with economic evidence, increasing parental inputs that enrich the child home environment and reduce stress has larger returns for children with higher socio-emotional skills in early childhood (complementarity), but only for levels of inputs that are high. For low levels of inputs, i.e. levels implying a stressful home environment, an increase has a higher return for children with lower socio-emotional skills in early childhood (substitutability). Consequently, well targeted policies can reduce middle childhood socio-emotional gaps.

Body condition influences ontogeny of foraging behavior in juvenile southern elephant seals.

Ontogeny of diving and foraging behavior in marine top predators is poorly understood despite its importance in population recruitment. This lack of knowledge is partly due to the difficulties of monitoring juveniles in the wild, which is linked to high mortality early in life. Pinnipeds are good models for studying the development of foraging behaviors because juveniles are large enough to robustly carry tracking devices for many months. Moreover, parental assistance is absent after a juvenile departs for its first foraging trip, minimizing confounding effects of parental input on the development of foraging skills. In this study, we tracked 20 newly weaned juvenile southern elephant seals from Kerguelen Islands for up to 338 days during their first trip at sea following weaning. We used a new generation of satellite relay tags, which allow for the transmission of dive, accelerometer, and location data. We also monitored, at the same time, nine adult females from the colony during their post‐breeding trips, in order to compare diving and foraging behaviors. Juveniles showed a gradual improvement through time in their foraging skills. Like adults females, they remarkably adjusted their swimming effort according to temporal changes in buoyancy (i.e., a proxy of their body condition). They also did not appear to exceed their aerobic physiological diving limits, although dives were constrained by their smaller size compared to adults. Changes in buoyancy appeared to also influence their decision to either keep foraging or return to land, alongside the duration of their haul outs and choice of foraging habitat (oceanic vs. plateau). Further studies are thus needed to better understand how patterns in juveniles survival, and therefore elephant seal populations, might be affected by their changes in foraging skills and changes in their environmental conditions.