Theme 7: Child-Development Research Can Improve Children’s Lives
One of the few goals shared by virtually everyone is that children be as happy and healthy as possible. Understanding how children develop can contribute to this goal. Theories of development provide general principles for interpreting children’s behavior and for analyzing their problems. Empirical studies yield specific lessons regarding how to promote children’s physical well-being, positive relationships with other people, and learning. In this section, we review practical implications of child-development research for raising children, educating them, and helping them overcome problems.
Implications for Parenting
Several principles of good parenting are so obvious that noting them might seem unnecessary. However, the number of children who are harmed each year by poor parenting makes it clear that these principles cannot be stated too often.
Pick a Good Partner
The first principle of good parenting comes into play before parenthood even begins: Pick a good partner. Given the importance of genetics, pick a partner whose physical, intellectual, and emotional characteristics suggest that he or she will provide your child with good genes. Given the importance of the environment, pick a partner who will be a good mother or father. In terms of your child’s development, no decision is more important than picking a good partner.
Ensure a Healthy Pregnancy
An expectant mother should maintain a healthy diet, have regular checkups, and keep stress levels as low as possible to increase the likelihood of a successful pregnancy. Equally important is avoiding teratogens such as tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs.
Know Which Decisions Are Likely to Have a Long-Term Impact
In addition to the joy they feel when their baby is born, new parents face a daunting number of decisions. Fortunately, babies are quite resilient. In the context of a loving and supportive home, a wide range of choices work out about equally well. Some decisions that seem minor, however, can have important effects. One such decision involves the baby’s sleeping position: having a baby sleep on his or her back, rather than on his or her stomach, reduces the possibility of SIDS.
In other cases, the lesson of child-development research is that early problems are often transitory, so there is no reason to worry about them. Colic, which affects about 10% of babies, is one such problem. A colicky baby’s frequent, high-pitched, grating, sick-sounding cries are difficult for parents to bear, but they have no long-term implications for the baby’s development. In the short run, the best approach is to soothe the baby to the extent possible and not feel at fault if the effort fails. In the longer run, the best path for parents is to relax, seek social support, and obtain babysitting help to allow some time off from caregiving—and to remember that colic usually ends by the time babies are 3 months old.
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Form a Secure Attachment
Most parents have no difficulty forming a secure attachment with their baby, but some parents and babies do not form such bonds. One reason is genetics: variant forms of certain genes can influence the likelihood of a child’s forming a secure parental attachment, in at least some circumstances. Of course, no one can control the genes that babies inherit, but parents and other caretakers can maximize the likelihood of a baby’s becoming securely attached by maintaining a positive approach in their caregiving and by being responsive to the baby’s needs. This is easier said than done, of course, and other dimensions of a baby’s temperament, as well as the parents’ attitude and responsiveness, influence the quality of attachment. However, even when babies are initially irritable and difficult, programs that teach parents how to be responsive and positive with them can lead to more secure attachments.
Provide a Stimulating Environment
The home environment has a great deal to do with children’s learning. One good example involves reading acquisition. Telling stories to toddlers and preschoolers, being responsive when they tell stories, and reading to them are positively related to later reading achievement. One reason is that such activities promote phonological awareness (the ability to identify the component sounds within words). Nursery rhymes seem to be particularly effective in this regard; children who repeatedly hear Green Eggs and Ham, for instance, generally learn to appreciate the similarities and differences in Sam, ham, am, and related words. Phonological awareness helps children learn to sound out words, which, in turn, helps them learn to retrieve the words’ identities quickly and effortlessly. Successful early reading leads children to read more, which helps them improve their reading further over the course of schooling. More generally, the more stimulating the intellectual environment, the more eager children will be to learn.
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Implications for Education
Theories and research on child development hold a number of further lessons for how to educate children most effectively. Consider the instructional implications of several major theories of cognitive development.
Piaget’s theory emphasizes the importance of the child’s active involvement, both mental and physical, in the learning process. This active involvement is especially important in helping children master counterintuitive ideas. For example, the physical experience of walking around a pivot while holding a long metal rod at points close to and far from the pivot allowed children to overcome a widely held misconception that previous paper-and-pencil physics lessons had failed to correct—the misconception that all parts of an object must move at the same speed.
Information-processing theories suggest that analyzing the types of information available to children in everyday activities can improve learning. One such analysis indicated that the simple board game Chutes and Ladders provided visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and temporal information that could help children learn the sizes of numbers. Consistent with this analysis, having children from low-income families play a game based on Chutes and Ladders improved the children’s understanding of the sizes of numbers, as well as their counting, recognition of numbers, and arithmetic learning.
Sociocultural theories emphasize the need to turn classrooms into communities of learners in which children cooperate with one another in their pursuit of knowledge. Rather than following the traditional model of instruction in which teachers lecture and children take notes, community-of-learners classrooms follow an approach in which teachers provide the minimum guidance needed for children to learn and gradually decrease their directive role as children’s competence increases. Such programs also encourage children to make use of the resources of the broader community—children and teachers at other schools, outside experts, reference books, websites, and so on. The approach can be effective not only in building intellectual skills but also in promoting desirable values, such as personal responsibility and mutual respect.
Implications for Helping Children at Risk
Several principles that have emerged from empirical research offer valuable guidance for helping children at risk for serious developmental problems.
The Importance of Timing
Providing interventions at the optimal time is crucial in a variety of developmental contexts. One important example involves efforts to help children at risk for learning difficulties. All theories of cognitive development indicate that such difficulties should be addressed early, before children lose confidence in their ability to learn or become resentful toward schools and teachers. This realization, together with research documenting that many children from impoverished backgrounds have difficulty in school, laid the groundwork for Project Head Start and a variety of experimental preschool programs. Evaluations of the programs’ effects indicate that both the small experimental programs and Project Head Start increase children’s IQs and achievement test scores by the end of the programs and for a few years thereafter. Subsequently, the positive effects on IQ and academic achievement usually fade, but other positive effects continue. At-risk children who participate in such programs are less likely to ever be held back in school or assigned to special-education classes than are those who do not participate, and they are more likely to graduate from high school and go to college.
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Even greater positive effects of early educational programs are possible, as illustrated by the Abecedarian Project. Designed to show what could be achieved through an optimally staffed, highly funded, and carefully designed program that started during infancy and lasted through age 5, the Abecedarian Project produced gains in both academic achievement and social skills that continued throughout childhood and adolescence. Its results demonstrate that it is possible for intensive programs that start early to have substantial, lasting benefits on poor children’s academic achievement.
Early detection of child maltreatment, and rapid intervention to end it, is also crucial. In the United States, roughly 1% of children age 17 and younger are abused or neglected in a given year. Inadequate care, physical abuse, and sexual abuse are the three most common problems. Parents who are stressed economically, have few friends, use alcohol and illegal drugs, or are being abused by their partner are the most likely to mistreat their children.
Knowing the characteristics of abused and neglected children can help teachers and others who come into contact with children recognize potential problems early and alert social service agencies so that they can investigate and remedy the problems. Children who are maltreated tend to have difficult temperaments, to have few friends, to be in poor physical or mental health, to do poorly in school, and to show abnormal aggression or passivity. Adolescents who are maltreated may be depressed or hyperactive, use drugs or alcohol, and have sexual problems such as promiscuity or abnormal fearfulness. Early recognition of such signs of abuse can literally save a child’s life.
Biology and Environment Work Together
Another principle with important practical implications is that biology and environment work together to produce all behavior. This principle has proved important in designing treatments for ADHD. Although stimulant drugs such as Ritalin are the best-known treatment for this problem, research has shown that when medications are used alone, their benefits usually end as soon as children stop taking them. Longer-lasting benefits require behavioral therapy as well as medication. One effective behavioral treatment is to teach the children strategies for screening out distractions. The medications calm children with ADHD sufficiently that they can benefit from the therapy; the therapy helps them learn effective ways for dealing with their problems and for interacting with other people.
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Every Problem Has Many Causes
An additional principle that has proved useful for helping children with developmental problems is that trying to identify the cause of any particular problem is futile; problems almost always have multiple causes. The greater the number of risks, the more likely children will have low IQs, poor socioemotional skills, and psychiatric disorders. Accordingly, providing effective treatment often requires addressing many particular difficulties. This principle has provided useful guidance for intervening with children who are rejected by other children. Helping these children gain better social skills requires increasing their understanding of other people. It also requires helping them learn new strategies, such as how to enter an ongoing group interaction unobtrusively and how to resolve conflicts without resorting to aggression. It also requires helping them learn from their own experience, for example, by monitoring the success of the different strategies they try. Together, these approaches can help rejected children make friends and become better accepted.
Improving Social Policy
Even if you do not have children of your own and rarely interact with other people’s children, your actions as a citizen can influence their lives. Votes in elections and referenda, opinions expressed in informal discussions, and participation in advocacy organizations all can make a difference. Knowledge of child-development research can inform your stances on many issues relevant to children. The conclusions that you reach will, and should, reflect your values as well as the evidence. For example, reductions in class size in kindergarten through 3rd grade classrooms have had variable effects on student achievement. A large-scale, well-implemented study in Tennessee, for instance, indicated positive effects on student achievement (Krueger, 1999), whereas a large-scale, well-implemented study in California did not show any effect on achievement (Stecher, McCaffrey, & Bugliari, 2003). Teachers and parents appeared to be pleased with the class-size reductions in both cases and believed that the smaller classes helped their children.
Are these outcomes worth the substantial cost of hiring the number of teachers needed to implement such reform (roughly $1.7 billion per year in California)? Research cannot answer this question, because the answer depends on values as well as data. How expensive is too expensive? Nonetheless, as the example illustrates, knowing the scientific evidence can help us, as citizens, make better-informed decisions.
Maternity Leave
Should society require employers to grant paid maternity leave in the months after a baby is born, and if so, for how long? Knowing that long hours of day care before an infant is 9 months old may sometimes have negative effects on early cognitive development argues in favor of society’s making it easier for parents to take maternity leave. However, other considerations such as economic costs are also important; as noted above, the scientific evidence alone can never be decisive.
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Day Care
Similar debates have arisen about whether the general society should subsidize day-care payments for parents of young children. One argument against such a policy has been the claim that children develop more successfully if they stay at home with one of their parents or other relatives than if they attend day care. This argument has turned out to be flawed, however. Children who attend good-quality day care develop similarly to children who receive care at home from their parents.
Eyewitness Testimony
Understanding child development is also vital for deciding whether children should be allowed to testify in court cases and for obtaining the most accurate testimony possible from them. Each year, more than 100,000 children in the United States testify in court, many of them in trials involving allegations of abuse. Often, the child and the accused are the only ones who witnessed the events. Research indicates that, in general, the accuracy of testimony increases with age; 8-year-olds recall more than do 6-year-olds, and 6-year-olds recall more than do 4-year-olds. However, when children are shielded from misleading and repeated questioning, even 4- and 5-year-olds usually provide accurate testimony about the types of issues that are central in court cases. Given the high stakes in such cases, using the lessons of research to elicit the most accurate possible testimony from children is essential for a just verdict.
Child-development research holds lessons for numerous other social problems as well. Research on the causes of aggression has led to programs such as Fast Track, which are designed to teach aggressive children to manage their anger and avoid violence. Research on the roots of morality has led to programs such as the Child Development Project, designed to encourage students to help others who are in need. Research on the effects of poverty has provided the basis for the Abecedarian Project and other early education efforts. There is no end of social problems; understanding child development can help address the ones that affect children’s futures.
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