Family Facts: Social Science Research on Family, Society & Religion
Top Ten Findings
Parenting Matters
July 2006
1. The amount of time a mother spends preparing her infant for child care matters. For infants entering child care, their attachments to their mothers were significantly more likely to remain or become emotionally secure if their mothers spent more time helping them adapt to child care.
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2. Maternal sensitivity in mother-child interactions impacts a child’s social development. Maternal sensitivity in mother-child interactions from infancy through the pre-school years was the strongest and most consistent predictor of children's social skills and behaviors throughout childhood. The more sensitive a mother was, the better the outcomes. All other predictors including family environment, socioeconomic status, maternal education, and child care quality, amount and type were less consistent predictors.
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3. How much a child is read to plays a role in his or her cognitive development. Children who scored in the highest quartile in terms of cognitive development had been read to frequently, while peers in the lowest quartile had rarely been read to.
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4. Children who do well in school are more likely to report having mothers who are warm and supportive but also firm. The most successful children (as measured by their achievement test scores and teachers' ratings) had mothers who struck a balance between being warm and supportive and setting and enforcing clear limits on their children's behavior. The children who were least successful had mothers whose disciplinary style was extreme--either too harsh or too permissive, but, most often, unduly harsh and punitive.
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5. Cognitive stimulation provided by the parents influences a child’s academic achievement. The amount of cognitive stimulation children receive from their parents was correlated with children's IQ and academic achievement to nearly the same extent that the mother's IQ was. After adjusting for mother's IQ, a 10-point increase in the level of cognitive stimulation provided by parents was associated with a 3-point increase in the child's IQ and a 2-point increase in math proficiency.
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6. Children under after-school adult supervision are less likely to engage in negative behaviors. Compared with peers who are unsupervised after school, children who are supervised by an adult after school are less likely to engage in risky or anti-social behaviors such as skipping school, using alcohol or drugs, stealing, or hurting someone. This is true even when controlling for other factors such as parents' permissive attitudes.
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7. Parental support and monitoring affect the likelihood of alcohol use by adolescents. Parental support is indirectly related to a decreased likelihood of adolescent alcohol use. Parental support, which includes praise, encouragement, and physical affection, is associated with an increase in parental monitoring. In turn, higher levels of parental monitoring are associated with a decreased likelihood of adolescent alcohol use.
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8. Adolescents prefer their parents, over school and peers, as their source of sex education. Adolescents prefer their parents as a source of sex education.
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9. Maternal employment in the first year impacts a child’s socio-emotional development. There was a clear pattern linking mothers' employment during the first year of their children's lives and their children's subsequent aggressive and problematic behavior. Even when taking into account gender, ethnicity, social class, and mothers' current employment status, third- and fourth-graders whose mothers worked when they were less than one year old were more likely to "act out," to have lower tolerance of frustration, and to be more likely to hit or be aggressive toward peers.
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Resources
Events:Religious Practice and Civic Life: What the Research Says October 4, 2007 |