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PARENTING VALUES AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH, ENGAGEMENT IN RESEARCH AND PROGRAM, AND PARENT-CHILD COMMUNICATION1
Barbara Alexander Pan and Catherine Snow
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Leah Bratton
Early Education Services
Conducting research and providing services to families in poverty is a formidable challenge. Many low-income families frequently relocate and often do not have reliable transportation or consistent phone service. These circumstances present challenges for researchers and service providers alike, especially those working with families in rural or geographically isolated areas. One of the outcomes many Early Head Start programs target is the quality of parent-child interaction and communication, but intervention can be effective only if families are involved and engaged with the program. Research carried out by the Harvard Graduate School of Education research team, with Early Education Services in Vermont, suggests that parenting values and emotional health may influence parents' participation in the research study, their use of Early Head Start services, and their access to intervention around parent-child communication and interaction.
At entry into the study, 133 parents2 living in Windham County, Vermont, completed the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAP, Milner 1986), a 120-item questionnaire about parenting values and beliefs, emotional health, and parents' relationships with others. The CAP provides an indication of the potential for abusive or neglectful parenting, as well as more specific indices of distress, rigidity, unhappiness, problems with child and self, problems with family, and problems with others. Validity scales provide measures of response distortion, such as respondents' attempts to provide socially desirable responses. In the present sample, between 20 and 26 percent of mothers scored above clinical thresholds for unhappiness, distress, problems with family or others, and/or child abuse potential, often despite parents' apparent efforts to project socially desirable responses. Some months later, when the target child was 14 months old, each parent was asked for permission to be videotaped at home interacting with her child around a set of toys provided by researchers. Seventy-six percent of parents (n = 101) who completed the CAP questionnaire at baseline were locatable and agreed to participate in this aspect of the study. Of those parents whose earlier responses on the CAP questionnaire indicated potential for child abuse/neglect, only 57 percent participated. Least likely to participate in the videotaped parent-child interaction were those parents whose responses evidenced both potential for child abuse/neglect and efforts to provide socially desirable responses. Thus, only 38 percent of parents (5 out of 13) in this subgroup are reflected in the data based on videotaped parent-child interaction when children were 14 months old.
This variability in participation as a function of parenting values and emotional health was mirrored in program involvement for program families. That is, of the 17 parents in the program group at risk for dysfunctional parenting, 11 dropped out of the program within a few months; a few others continued in the program but engaged only minimally. Only four actually engaged in the program in a meaningful way for an extended period of time. Parents who are experiencing stress around the parent-child relationship may be particularly difficult to engage in a program that focuses on parenting and on child development.
Previous research has shown that quantity and quality of adult communication predict children's rate of vocabulary growth, which in turn predicts children's later academic achievement. While there is some evidence that richness of adult communicative input to children is related to socioeconomic status, there is enormous variation among mothers of similar socioeconomic status as well (Pan and Rowe 1999). Because mothers differ so widely in their degree of communication, intervention programs such as Early Head Start need better ways of targeting mothers most in need of intensive intervention around communication with their infants and toddlers. Unfortunately, the findings reported here suggest that those mothers may also be among the parents most difficult to engage in the program and, furthermore, that they are often missing from the research picture, because they have reservations about participating fully in the research and because researchers cannot locate them. Use of instruments such as the CAP at entry to the program may help identify those parents who are at risk of dropping out prematurely and whose children may be at risk for abuse or neglect.
Furthermore, the results of this study suggest that program staff may need to give particular attention to developing working relationships with parents experiencing high levels of stress around their role as parent. Often, help in overcoming social and environmental barriers must precede direct work on parenting, parent-child communication, and child development. For those high-risk mothers with whom staff are able to form a working relationship and who do engage in the program in a sustained fashion, intervention can then focus on ways of alleviating parenting distress, developing parents' skills in reading infants' signals, and cultivating parents' enjoyment of interaction and communication with their children.
References
Milner, J. The Child Abuse Potential Inventory: Manual. Webster, NC: Psytec, 1986.
Pan, B., and M. Rowe. "Sources of Variation in the Amount Mothers Talk and Gesture in Interaction with Their 14-Month-Old Children." Paper presented at the Eighth International Congress for the Study of Child Language, San Sebastian, Spain, July 12-16, 1999.
1Based on Pan, B.A., and L. Bratton. "Parenting Stress and Maternal Communication with Toddlers." Paper presented at Head Start's Fifth National Research Conference, Washington, DC, June 28-July 1, 2000.(back)
2Questionnaire not completed by 33 of the 146 mothers in the total sample.(back)
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