Parent Child Interaction

Developmental transitions, such as the onset of walking, are associated with changes in a broad range of domains, including language development and social interactions. This study used a full-day home observation recording to compare the language environment of age-matched crawling and walking infants. Central to the study was exploring how the language environment related to vocabulary development of each locomotor group. Adult words, infant vocalizations, and parent-child conversational turn-taking were positively associated with infant vocabulary development, but only for walking infants. These findings provide further evidence for the integrated nature of infant locomotion, language development, and the social and linguistic environment.

This easy-to-read, comprehensive guide contains what you need to know on how to parent with ‎confidence. Packed with advice and powerful tips, using the latest research on child development and ‎parenting techniques, it offers a mine of information on how to let children flourish, take the ‎frustration out of parenting and develop happy family relations. Authors provide guidance on ‎developing character, knowledge, values, and skills, as well as a faith-based outlook in children, ‎benefitting parents with kids of all ages. The many strategies and techniques offered include teaching ‎children how to problem-solve, make decisions, and develop self-esteem. Raising God conscious, moral, ‎successful children, with a sense of civic responsibility in today’s world is not easy. It is also not ‎impossible. Effective parenting is the key. ‎

Most importantly the book proposes Islamic solutions to problematic issues in raising children. I was impressed ‎‎with the comprehensive coverage of most available theories of child development. Authors have not missed talking ‎‎about the common misconceptions of popular psychology.‎

Dr. Kutaiba Chaleby, Child Psychiatrist, certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is also ‎former Head, Section of Psychiatry, King Faisal Hospital and Research Center, Saudi Arabia.‎

One of the most insightful and comprehensive books on effective parenting. The work tackles issues in the home ‎‎environment and the experiential world of children and has the ingredients to transform families across the globe. ‎

Edris Khamissa, International Consultant in Education and Human Development ‎

The book has many outstanding features and I say this as an author of many books on the subject of parenting and ‎‎family matters, which have been translated into various languages. Presents many resources and valuable references ‎‎to help parents, points out the proper sense of fulfilment for children and emphasizes that this should come from ‎‎community attachment and involvement as well as a family bond, and offers a great list of activities at the end of ‎‎each chapter, which, if applied by parents, will ensure a healthy and positive family atmosphere.‎

Dr. Mohamed R. Beshir, member of the advisory board of SIFCA “Shura of Islamic Family Counselors of ‎America.” Also, Advisor to the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) ‎departments on Tarbiyah matters.‎

The book encourages parenting by both the Father and Mother versed in family communication. The investment ‎of ‎time, effort, love and understanding in raising children who will have their own personalities is emphasized ‎‎repeatedly. The Qur’anic references in this book are good and make the point without overwhelming the larger ‎‎message. Clearly the authors have an impressive religious background and they marshal their arguments well. It ‎‎would not surprise me if parts of the book were extracted and summarized for seminars, counselling and other ‎‎tasks.‎

Paul Henry Tyson, retired US Foreign Service Officer who has worked in
Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.‎

Language development requires both basic cognitive mechanisms for learning language and a rich social context from which learning takes off. Disruptions in learning mechanisms, processing abilities, and/or social interactions increase the risks associated with social exclusion or developmental delays. Given the complexity of language processes, a multilevel approach is proposed where both cognitive mechanisms, genetic and environmental factors need to be probed together with their possible interactions. Here we review and discuss such interplay between environment and genetic predispositions in understanding language disorders, with a particular focus on a possible endophenotype, the ability for statistical sequential learning.

A large body of empirical research has focused on understanding children's biological knowledge development. However, limited research has investigated the informal learning experiences through which children actively construct biological concepts. The current study focused on examining whether parents provide information that supports and shapes children's emerging biological knowledge within settings that provide opportunities for biological learning about animals. We observed parent–child interaction within informal learning environments about two different types of animals: A penguin exhibit at a zoo and an insect exhibit at a science museum. Fifty-two families with preschool and school-aged children participated. Parents more frequently provided important, unobservable information such as predictions and causal inferences to the youngest children, potentially supporting the development of children's knowledge. However, parents seldom explicitly supported their children's knowledge by providing explanations of readily observable biological processes. Further research examining these and other direct and indirect animal experiences in informal learning settings can help us better understand how to support children's early biological learning.

Consistent with inclusive fitness theory, evolutionary biologists predict that individuals care more for their biological than their social children and hence that biological children assess the relationships to their parents better than stepchildren. To test this assumption, we use data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Unlike many other studies
that have been conducted so far, this survey allows us to analyze the consequences of the dynamic between social and biological parent-child relationships  within the same families. We use
comparisons of sibling pairs and fixed-effects regression to achieve the within-family comparison. Both the descriptive and multivariate regression results confirm that – even after controlling for other relevant influences – biological parenthood
matters with regard to children’s relationship assessments (perceived parental care and closeness of the parent-child relationship) and in both the relationships to resident fathers and mothers. In the discussion, we comment on the possible inte-
gration of the evolutionary and sociological perspectives and close with some recommendations for future data collection that could allow researchers to analyze the relative impact of biological and social influences on parent-child relationships on a more fine-grained level.

The article investigates two interconnected issues: the interaction organization in a family ritual and the modes of small children's participation in it. Focusing on the celebration of a first birthday in Poland, we explore how the different modes of a one-year-old child taking part in the multiparty interaction are collaboratively produced. We present two contrastive cases in terms of differences in space arrangements and children's body control, which are analyzed in relation to their own initiatives and responses. We suggest that the differentiations in their organization correspond to changing social meanings and effects of the whole ritual.

Everyday interaction is not a faultless process. It is possible for the process to experience troubles in speaking, hearing or understanding that can lead to interactional breakdowns between speakers. One available mechanism for speakers to address and resolve trouble is through other-initiated repair (OIR). Majority of OIR studies to date have used English language as data source. This may not entirely describe similar strategies employ by speakers of other languages when they participate in OIR. The present study aims to examine strategies for speakers of Malay language to initiate repair following troubles in everyday interaction. Three parent-child dyads of Malay language speakers were selected as participants. Their interaction over several homely activities (i.e. family meal time) were recorded and later transcribed following Jefferson Transcription System (2004). Analysis on strategies was quantitatively performed following Philip's (2008) Clarification Request coding scheme. Overall result showed that parents and children employ different types of strategies when they are in position to initiate repair. Children largely depend on the use of open-class word that is known to be a weak repair initiator while parents are consistent with a more specific repair initiator. Result from this study provides novel discovery on how Malay speakers initiate repair in the context of parent-child interaction and it can serve as comparative data for future typological studies.

Parent-child dyadic rigidity and negative affect contribute to children’s higher levels of externalizing problems.  The present longitudinal study examined whether the opposite constructs of dyadic flexibility and positive affect predicted lower levels of externalizing behavior problems across the early childhood period.  Mother-child (N = 163) and father-child (n = 94) dyads engaged in a challenging block design task at home when children were three years old.  Dynamic systems methods were used to derive dyadic positive affect and three indicators of dyadic flexibility (range, dispersion, and transitions) from observational coding.  We hypothesized that the interaction between dyadic flexibility and positive affect would predict lower levels of externalizing problems at age five and a half years as rated by mothers and teachers, controlling for stability in externalizing problems, task time, child gender, and the child’s effortful control.  The hypothesis was supported in predicting teacher ratings of child externalizing from both mother-child and father-child interactions.  There were also differential main effects for mothers and fathers: mother-child flexibility was detrimental and father-child flexibility was beneficial for child outcomes.  Results support the inclusion of adaptive and dynamic parent-child coregulation processes in the study of children’s early disruptive behavior.

Parent-child shared reading of storybooks is an important activity for language development, especially if it is carried out dialogically. Dialogic Reading (DR) is a shared reading activity in which the adult intersperses reading out loud with questions about the story, praising and expanding the child´s verbalizations. It is important to ask open questions (not answerable with yes or no, nor simply by pointing), thus giving the child opportunities to engage verbally and produce increasingly complex responses. DR should begin early and be performed regularly in order to impact language, hence the importance of investigating effective instruction strategies. Parental DR training using video modeling has shown promising effects, but few studies have directly assessed the effects on parents´ behavior during shared reading, which was the aim of the present study. Pedro, Clara and Aline participated with their children in a four-stage training program using an across-subject multiple baseline design: Baseline (BL), in which they read with their children as usual; Intervention 1 - Learning to Ask Open Questions, focused on asking simple open questions about narrative and illustrations (e.g., who, when, how, where, etc.); Intervention 2 - Learning to Praise and Expand, focused on teaching parents to recognize and praise their children’s participation and to expand their responses; Intervention 3 - Learning to Vary Questions, focused on the inclusion of questions requiring the child to recall previous parts of the story, make inferences and relate the story to their personal experiences. Training and shared reading took place in participants´ homes.

Each intervention included (1) feedback on repertoires acquired in the previous phase, (2) Instructions (3) Video Modeling. After each intervention, parents were instructed to apply what they learned during the following weeks and record reading sessions using a digital camera. Parents’ behavior was scored with an adapted version of the ACIRI (Adult / Child Interactive Reading Inventory) in which the three-point qualitative scale was replaced by response rate for countable behaviors. Results showed no interaction beyond straight reading of storybooks during BL, confirming previous studies. Parents´ questions and praise emerged immediately after Intervention 1 for Pedro and Clara. Aline was given a boost training session focused on selecting books for DR, to overcome a pattern of questions and answers centered on vocabulary. Parents´ open questions established a dialogue that was maintained throughout subsequent sessions and with different books. There were no results clearly attributable to Intervention 2 and only Pedro formulated some of the new types of questions taught in Intervention 3. We discuss the complexity of components taught in each intervention in terms of stimulus control, e.g., recall questions require the adult´s behavior to be sensitive to previous parts of the story, which is not necessarily true in the case of simple wh- questions about illustrations. More explicit instruction methodologies may be needed for these more complex DR strategies. We suggest that future studies plan interventions based on the stimulus control relations involved in each DR strategy.

Home learning environments prior to school are well-known predictors of educational trajectories but research has neglected children aged under three. The new Toddler Home Learning Environment (THLE) scale is one response and this paper investigates its reliability and validity. The THLE is an adaptation of the Preschool HLE (PHLE) measure developed by the Effective PreSchool Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) investigation in the 1990s. The THLE was developed as part of the Evaluation of Children's Centers in England (ECCE) investigation that followed a sample of 2,608 of families from 14 to 38 months. The THLE was administered at 14 months, the PHLE at 38. The 8-item THLE evidences internal consistency via statistical reliability coefficients and Confirmatory Factor Analysis plus measurement validity via statistically significant and research-appropriate associations with the PHLE, three measures of child development, and child and parent demographics. This paper moves the HLE literature forward with a new parental self-report scale of the HLE that is for use with toddlers.