Marc H. Bornstein, PhD, Head, Child and Family Research Section
Linda Cote, PhD, Research Scientist
Chun-Shin Hahn, PhD, Research Fellow
Nanmathi Manian, PhD, Research Fellow
Maurice Haynes, PhD, Staff Scientist
Charlie Hendricks, PhD, Statistician
Diane Putnick, PhD, Statistician
Clay Mash, PhD, Research Psychologist
Kathy Painter, MS, Research Psychologist
Joan Suwalsky, MS, Research Psychologist
Elisabeth Conradt, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Mark Cusick, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Blake Harrington, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Sarah Jones, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Jennie Kim, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Liz Kuttler, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Lily May, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Erica Moran, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Maria Sumaroka, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Anne Waring, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
Deborah Zlotnik, BA, Postbaccalaureate Fellow

We investigate dispositional, experiential, and environmental factors that contribute to physical, mental, emotional, and social development in human beings through the first two decades of life. Our overall goals are to describe, analyze, and assess the capabilities and proclivities of developing human beings, including their genetic characteristics; physiological functioning; perceptual and cognitive abilities; emotional, social, and interactional styles; and the nature and consequences for children and parents of family development and children's exposure to and interactions with their natural and designed surroundings. Project designs are experimental, observational, longitudinal, and cross-sectional as well as intracultural and cross-cultural. Sociodemographic comparisons include family socioeconomic status, maternal age and employment status, and child parity and daycare experience. In addition to the United States, study sites include Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Peru, and the Republic of South Korea.

Child development and parenting

Bornstein, Hahn, Haynes, Hendricks, Putnick, Painter, Suwalsky

Parenting constitutes the initial and continuing all-encompassing ecology of child development. Parents play central roles in children's physical survival, social growth, emotional maturation, and cognitive development. We are broadly concerned with analyzing and understanding the roles of parenting in human development. One study examined the role of maternal chronological age in prenatal and perinatal history, social support, and parenting practices of new mothers. Primiparas of five-month-old infants ranged in age from 13 to 42 years. Age effects were zero, linear, and nonlinear. Nonlinear age effects were significantly associated up to a certain age, with little or no association thereafter; spline regression showed that the estimated points at which the slope of the regression line changed were 25 years for prenatal and perinatal history, 31 years for social supports, and 27 years for parenting practices. We also studied several parenting cognitions and practices in first-time parents of 20-month-old children. Again, age effects were zero, linear, and nonlinear. Nonlinear age effects determined by spline regression showed significant associations to a "knot" age (about 30 years), with little or no association thereafter. For age-sensitive parenting cognitions and practices, we proposed a two-phase model of parental development. Given the expanding range of parents' ages, our findings underscore the importance of incorporating maternal chronological age as a factor in studies of child development, parenting, and family process.

Emotional availability (EA) is a prominent index of socioemotional adaptation in the parent-child dyad. In one methodological study, we examined the short-term stability and continuity in EA as measured on individual and dyadic Emotional Availability Scales and in clusters of individuals and dyads among mothers and their five-month-olds observed twice at home. In a second methodological study, we observed mothers and their two-year-olds in two settings (home versus laboratory) one week apart. Significant cross-context reliability and continuity emerged in EA. Our work documents the psychometric properties of emotional availability from both variable and person orientations. Given that context does not affect EA, cross-context generalizations about EA status in the dyad may be warranted.

One major review focused on parents and parenting, theories of parenting, determinants of parenting, the multicausal context of parenting effects, parenting cognitions and practices, and parenting interventions. Mothers and fathers guide the development of their children via many direct and indirect means: biological parents contribute to the genetic makeup of their offspring, and all parents shape their children's experiences and influence their development by what they believe and how they act. Parents also influence their children by virtue of each partner's influence on the other and their associations with larger social networks. Although stature in maturity is shaped by the actions of individuals themselves as well as by individuals' contexts, parenting helps determine the course and outcome of human ontogeny. Marc Bornstein, founding editor of the journal Parenting: Science and Practice, has edited the five-volume Handbook of Parenting, with eight volumes published, in press, or in production in the Monographs in Parenting Series.

Language and cognition in childhood

Bornstein, Hahn, Haynes, Putnick

Language acquisition is one of the great achievements of early childhood. Parental reports and checklists, such as the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), are standard sources for cost-effective rapid general evaluations of child language. These measures focus on vocabulary, a key marker in child language development and a prominent part of child language that parents hear and attend to. However, when different adults converse with the same child, they do not necessarily discuss the same topics or use identical language. In consequence, lexical usage between children and adults typically varies across conversants and circumstances. Thus, any one adult familiar with a particular child normally knows that child's communicative ability only on the basis of contacts with the child. It follows that, if different adults familiar with a child are asked to report about that child's communicative ability, they will not necessarily entirely agree, and any one reporter cannot provide a complete picture of the child's communicative abilities.

One study used an adaptation of the MacArthur CDI to explore agreement at two ages among three reporters. Middle-class monolingual families consisting of the child, mother, father, and third person (childcare provider or grandparent) completed the MacArthur CDI for the same children at 13 and 20 months of age. At both time points, considerable inter- and intrafamily variation emerged in how the three reporters, who were all familiar with the child, assessed a particular child's communicative abilities. In no single family did all reporters completely agree with each other for all items on the CDI. Reporters agreed with each other for at least half the items, and there were few items for which all three reporters had a different assessment. Reporter disagreement increased between 13 and 20 months probably because of the increased communicative ability of older children and the concomitant increase in contextually determined variation in language use. We found no differences in the number of words that mothers, fathers, and third persons reported that the child could understand at 13 or 20 months. However, mothers reported significantly more words produced than third persons for children at 20 months of age. Mothers', fathers', and third persons' comprehension scores were all significantly intercorrelated, as were their production scores.

To account for several reporters' potentially divergent assessments of the same child, we developed comprehension and production "cumulative" scores that credit the child with the best score for each item on the CDI, as checked by any single reporter. Compared with individual reporters, the cumulative score gives the child credit for more words understood and produced. The cumulative score and individual reporters' scores were highly correlated for word comprehension and production. Mothers' and third persons' comprehension scores did not differ from the cumulative comprehension score, but their production scores were lower; fathers' comprehension and production scores were lower than cumulative comprehension and production scores. For all reporters and the cumulative score, we found significant stability in comprehension and production from 13 to 20 months and, as expected, significant increases in comprehension and production. Cumulative scores are valid representations of children's reported language and merit both empirical and clinical attention.

Developmental science is concerned equally with two distinctive features of children's formidable tasks of assimilating information in the environment and accommodating their cognitive structures to that information. The first feature describes children's group mean level performance over time. The majority of children obviously improve in cognition as they age. The second feature describes the standing of individual children over time. Prevailing opinion since the inception of the mental measurement movement has held that individual development is unstable: over time, individual children change unpredictably in their abilities. We undertook a large-scale, controlled, multivariate, prospective microgenetic four-year study that revealed a statistically significant cascade of species-typical cognitive abilities from early infancy through middle childhood. Infancy is a recognizable starting point of life; we found that, to a small but significant degree, infancy also represents a setting point in the life of the individual.

Acculturation in children and parents in contemporary America

Bornstein, Cote

We compared the cognitions and play in immigrant (Japanese and South Americans in the United States) families with the cognitions and play in families in their countries of origin (Japan and Argentina, respectively) and in a common country of destination (European Americans in the United States).

We examined the acculturation of mothers' parenting cognitions and practices at the individual and group levels, at the individual level by looking at whether immigrant mothers' acculturation level predicts their parenting cognitions and practices, and at the group level by comparing immigrant mothers' parenting cognitions and practices to those of mothers in the cultures of origin and destination. Acculturation at the group level is more robust than acculturation at the individual level. Parenting practices acculturate more readily than parenting cognitions. South American immigrant mothers' parenting cognitions more closely resemble those of mothers in the United States, whereas Japanese immigrant mothers' cognitions tend to be similar to those of Japanese mothers or intermediate between Japanese and U.S. mothers, suggesting that Japanese mothers' parenting cognitions acculturate more slowly than South American mothers' parenting cognitions.

We also investigated Japanese American and South American immigrant mothers' actual and ideal social, didactic, and limit-setting interactions with their 5- and 20-month-old children. Ethnic differences in mothers' actual social, didactic, and limit setting behaviors were attributable to mothers' cultural beliefs (collectivism). Discrepancies between ideal and actual behaviors emerged for all three parenting domains. Parents' didactic and limit-setting behaviors were discontinuous from infancy to toddlerhood. Mothers' social and didactic behaviors were stable from infancy to toddlerhood, and South American mothers' limit setting was also stable. Immigrant mothers reported that they engage in and value behaviors important in their culture of origin, such as social exchanges, and engage in behaviors valued in their culture of destination, such as didactic interactions. The pattern of results for limit setting differed. Japanese immigrant mothers, like mothers in Japan, reported less actual and ideal engagement in childrearing than European American mothers; however, South American immigrant mothers, like European American mothers, reported more actual and ideal limit setting than mothers in their country of origin. Immigrant mothers said that they would actually or ideally engage in more social and didactic behavior than mothers in their country of origin or their country of destination, suggesting that immigrant mothers emphasize the parenting styles valued in both their culture of origin (namely, social exchanges) and their culture of destination (i.e., didactic interactions), perhaps in an effort to merge the two cultural traditions.

Play of immigrant children and mothers was similar to that of European American children's and mothers' play. Japanese and Argentine children engage in more symbolic play, whereas immigrant children engage in more exploratory play. South American immigrant mothers demonstrate and solicit more exploratory play than Argentine mothers. Japanese mothers solicit more symbolic play, and Argentine mothers demonstrate more symbolic play than immigrant mothers.

COLLABORATORS

Jeffrey J. Arnett, PhD, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Martha E. Arterberry, PhD, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA
Giovanna Axia, PhD, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italy
Hiroshi Azuma, PhD, Shirayuri College, Tokyo, Japan
Roger Bakeman, PhD, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Sashi Bali, PhD, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya
Laura E. Caulfield, PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
W. Andrew Collins, PhD, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Janet A. DiPietro, PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Motti Gini, PhD,University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Annik de Houwer, PhD, Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium
Margaret Kabiru, PhD, The Kenya Institute of Education, Nairobi, Kenya
Shagufa Kapadia, PhD, _University of Baroda, Baroda, India
Keumjoo Kwak, PhD, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea_
Sharone Maital, PhD, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Maria-Lucia Moura de Seidl, PhD, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
A. Bame Nsamenang, PhD, The Institute of Human Sciences, Bameda, Cameroon
Liliana Pascual, PhD, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Marie-Germaine Pêcheux, PhD, CNRS, Paris, France
Rodolfo de Castro Ribas, Jr., PhD, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Alan Slater, PhD, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, PhD, New York University, New York, NY
Suedo Toda, PhD, Hokkaido University of Education, Hokkaido, Japan
Paola Venuti, PhD, Scienze e Tecniche di Psicologia Cognitiva Applicata, Treneto, Italy
André Vyt, PhD, Catholic Institute of Health Care, Ghent, Belgium
Celia Zingman de Galperín, PhD, Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina

For further information, contact bornstem@cfr.nichd.nih.gov.