Child development in a low-income family-Extended bibliography

The article “Factors Affecting Toddler Cognitive Development in Low-Income Families” describes a study done with 84 low-income mothers and their toddlers. The study revolved around three basic ideas that have been found to affect early child cognitive development in related research. These three factors were that level of maternal knowledge, maternal stress and maternal supportiveness during mother-child interactions. The results of this study were used to stress what factors should be focused on in intervention programs with low-income families. There was a correlation between low cognitive scores in two of the three areas. Maternal depression, surprisingly, had no affect on cognitive scores at either age.

         In the results of this experiment they mentioned a possible bias when comparing scores of cognitive development and maternal depression. The mothers and their baby’s were only video taped for twenty minutes and I believe that signs of incompetent mother-child interactions are subject to judgment. The conductors were very surprised by this result because they strongly believed the every day struggles of raising a child in a low-income family would cause a great deal of stress which would most likely lead to depression.

            The Baby Steps agency deals directly with many of the issues suggested in this experiment. They offer many education opportunities to teach mothers life skills and ways to improve the birth and development of their baby. I believe these types of programs are necessary to help mothers learn how to handle situations that are difficult and sometimes out of their hands. I think that teaching mothers how to deal with the stress of going to work, possibly living paycheck to paycheck, and raising a family is one of the most important things a program like Baby Steps can teach.

            I only disagreed with the experiment in the fact that they didn’t find a correlation between maternal depression and cognitive scores. Nurturing is a necessary part of a baby’s development and it would be hard for a mother to tend to his/her needs if she is sick herself. They did mention that they were not ready to say depression and cognitive scores were unrelated since a lot of previous research has shown otherwise.