Search

There is considerable variability in developmental outcomes of children whose mothers experience depression. Few longitudinal studies have examined contributions of paternal involvement in the association between maternal postnatal depression (PND) and offspring development. We examined pathways from maternal PND at 8 weeks (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale; total score) to offspring emotional and behavioral development at 7 years (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire; total score) through behavioral, affective, and cognitive dimensions of paternal involvement in a U.K.-based birth cohort (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children; n = 3,434). Analyses were adjusted for baseline confounders and paternal PND (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale; total score) as an intermediate confounder. Maternal PND was strongly associated with offspring development, but this association was not mediated by the combination of all indirect pathways through various dimensions of paternal involvement. Only father--child conflict emerged as a risk factor for adverse offspring development and as a mediator in the association between maternal PND and offspring development (albeit the effect size was small). If found causal, interventions that reduce father-child conflict may reduce the risk of adverse development in offspring of mothers with PND.

This study coordinates moral value development in adolescence, parenting style, and gender with issues of stability and specificity. The primary research question asked whether parenting styles of mothers and fathers influence the development of adolescent moral values, and secondary research questions asked whether adolescent moral values were stable and whether gender moderated predictive relations of parenting styles and adolescent moral values. At 14 and 18 years, a sample of 246 adolescents completed the Sociomoral Reflection Objective Measure -- Short Form; at 14 years, mothers and fathers self-reported their parenting styles using the Parental Authority Questionnaire. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses established a 2-factor model of adolescent moral values across the two ages: Life and Social Contract captured prosocial aspects of morality that are left to individual choice, and Law and Social Order captured acts that are legally or morally obligatory for individuals to perform. Structural equation modeling investigated relations between parental parenting styles and the two adolescent moral value factors, with adolescent age, gender, and family SES as covariates. Both moral values factors had high stabilities across the 4-year period. Mothers' authoritarian parenting at 14 years, but not their authoritative or permissive parenting, negatively predicted Life and Social Contract moral values, but not Law and Social Order, in adolescents at 18 years, more so for boys. Fathers' parenting styles did not predict adolescents' moral values at 18 years. Girls and adolescents from higher-SES families had higher Life and Social Contract moral values at 14 years; boys experienced more increases in Life and Social Contract moral values from 14 to 18 years than girls. Stability and parental predictive validity of moral values for adolescence are discussed.

Play during childhood is essential to growth and learning. Little is known about whether categories of toys moderate play behaviors at different ages, or how children interact with toys that are simple, appropriate, or complex for their developmental level. Two hundred and forty-three children between the ages of 1 and 8 years, divided into four age groups, played with toys that were targeted to their age group as well as toys aimed at one age group younger and older. Toys fell into nine different categories. Whether children fully utilized each toy was evaluated. Analyses examined how children's utilization of toys was affected by the age-appropriateness of the toy, the category of toy, and the child's age. Considering all age groups and toys, children were less likely to fully utilize toys targeted toward older children than age-appropriate toys, but this effect was moderated by the toy category and the child's age.

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book reading and toy playing. In contrast, their mothers' speech contained more verbs than nouns in both English and Mandarin but differed depending on the context of the interaction. Although toddlers demonstrated a noun bias for both languages, the noun bias was more pronounced in English than in Mandarin. Together, these findings support early noun dominance as a widespread phenomenon in the lexical acquisition debate but also provide evidence that language specificity also plays a minor role in children's early lexical development.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented families around the world with extraordinary challenges related to physical and mental health, economic security, social support, and education. The current study capitalizes on a longitudinal, cross-national study of parenting, adolescent development, and young adult competence to document the association between personal disruption during the pandemic and reported changes in internalizing and externalizing behavior in young adults and their mothers since the pandemic began. It further investigates whether family functioning during adolescence 3 years earlier moderates this association. Data from 484 families in five countries (Italy, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States) reveal that higher levels of reported disruption during the pandemic are related to reported increases in internalizing and externalizing behaviors after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic for young adults (M[subscript age] = 20) and their mothers in all five countries, with the exception of one association in Thailand. Associations between disruption during the pandemic and young adults' and their mothers' reported increases in internalizing and externalizing behaviors were attenuated by higher levels of youth disclosure, more supportive parenting, and lower levels of destructive adolescent-parent conflict prior to the pandemic. This work has implications for fostering parent-child relationships characterized by warmth, acceptance, trust, open communication, and constructive conflict resolution at all times given their protective effects for family resilience during times of crisis.

We compared language comprehension and production across the second year of life in children of clinically depressed mothers who later remitted with children of nondepressed mothers. Altogether, 157 mother-child dyads participated: 46 with mothers diagnosed at infant age 5 months as having major, minor, or other depressive disorders who fully remitted by 15 and 24 months and 111 with nondepressed mothers. The majority of mothers (mean [M] age = 32.8 years) were married, European American, and college educated. The groups did not differ on most sociodemographic indices, and analyses controlled for residual group differences in maternal education and child birth order. Children of early clinically depressed mothers understood fewer words at 15 months (by maternal report on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory [MCDI]) and 24 months (by experimenter-administered Reynell Developmental Language Scales [RDLS]) than children of nondepressed mothers. Children of nondepressed mothers increased in language comprehension from 15 to 24 months, whereas children of early clinically depressed mothers did not. Aggregating over 15 and 24 months, nondepressed mothers reported that their children expressed more words than clinically depressed mothers reported their children expressed; experimenter assessment revealed no difference between the two groups. Maternal clinical depression in the first 5 months is related to reduced language comprehension and production during the second year of life even in children whose mothers remit, indicating an early experience effect of maternal clinical depression in muting child language development. Future research should identify the mechanisms by which this early experience effect occurs to inform targeted early preventative interventions for at-risk children.

This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related social-skills, chronological age, gender) on children's English-language development in phonological awareness (PA), receptive vocabulary (RV), and word reading (WR). Altogether, 736 four- to five-year-old Singaporean Mandarin-English speaking kindergarteners were assessed twice longitudinally. Their English-language PA, RV, and WR development was predicted using the eight external factors and five internal factors with Bayesian least absolute shrinkage and selection operators. Internal factors explained more variance than external factors in all three language domains. External factors had their largest impact on RV.