By Emily Leclerc | Waisman Science Writer
❂ At A Glance
- Early Language Skills Are Important for Many Reasons – Research has shown that children with strong early language skills are less likely to have long-term adverse academic, social, and health outcomes.
- Public Policy is Important but Not at a Clinical Level – Studying the impact of system level influences, such as housing and resource access, and public policy decisions on children’s early language skills is important but they are an indirect and often unchangeable influence. They are also not useful for making clinical and family level decisions because they do not account for the variability and individuality of families.
- A Focus on Parenting Beliefs, Rather than Socioeconomic Status, is More Impactful when Developing Interventions – A new study from the Waisman Center suggests that when it comes to boosting young children’s language skills, what parents believe and how they interact with their kids is more informative for individual clinical decisions than socioeconomic status. The study also found that more collaborative parenting beliefs and higher amounts of developmental knowledge had significant positive impacts on their children’s language skills.
A new study from the Waisman Center suggests that when it comes to boosting young children’s language skills, what parents believe and how they interact with their kids is more informative for individual clinical decisions than socioeconomic status.
Understanding how broader environment and public health decisions impact children’s language development is critical for group-level policy decisions, advocacy, and systems-level supports. However, on an individual level children’s language strengths and needs vary widely regardless of income: socioeconomic status is not an individual clinical indicator. Focusing on individual strengths and needs is important to create individualizable interventions to help support early language development. New work from the lab of Waisman investigator Rebecca Alper, PhD, CCC-SLP assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders at UW-Madison, showcases that understanding how modifiable skills – such as parenting beliefs and amount of developmental knowledge – shape a child’s early language development may provide more impactful, individual intervention opportunities.
Foundational language skills are established early in a child’s life and strong early language is associated with lower risk of long-term adverse academic, social, and health outcomes. “Early language skills can be a really big buffer against later adversity,” Alper says. The first five years in particular are crucial. “Children’s language skills are highly variable and malleable between birth to five,” Alper says. “This time period is potentially a really powerful one to shape a child’s language trajectory.”
There is a lot that can influence how well a child develops language. Everything from higher level public policies to individual interactions between parents and child. Understanding how factors like socioeconomic status, resource access, and societal support influence child language development is important for putting together large-scale public health policy but are considered indirect influences in terms of developing interventions.
“System level factors can be supports or barriers to children’s language development. There’s been a lot of focus on things like early economic adversity as a systems level barrier that can interfere indirectly with early language exposure,” Alper says. “But on an individual clinical level, knowing that a family meets criteria for potential social benefits or supports doesn’t tell us anything about how they actually interact with their child or the characteristics that we might want to support or foster as part of an intervention.”
Alper’s new study, Beyond SES (socioeconomic status): A strengths-focused SEM (structural equation modeling) study of collaboration-focused parenting beliefs, interaction quality, and language outcomes, which was published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, highlights the importance of studying the impacts of parenting beliefs, practices, and the level of developmental knowledge on early language development in order to develop beneficial interventions.
Focusing on characteristics that are modifiable by clinicians and families and have a direct impact on the child present better opportunities for creating more adaptable and effective interventions. “We need those system-level supports but we can’t make clinical decisions based on those group-level characteristics because there is so much variability in families,” Alper says. “Every family is unique and needs an adaptive approach.”
She found more collaborative approaches to parenting that value encouraging children to learn actively and express themselves as opposed to compliance-focused beliefs where parents value high levels of obedience from children, had significant and positive effects on children’s language skills at two and three years of age. Additionally, parents who had higher education levels were more likely to favor collaborative parenting styles which predicted greater quality interactions between the parents and children at age two. “We also observed in the data that how parents perceived their role in parenting was a better predictor of their interaction quality and their child’s language outcomes than the broad indicator socioeconomic status,” Alper says.
For her, one of the study’s key takeaways is that they didn’t find one optimal combination of parenting beliefs that led to good early language outcomes. There were many different ways that parents supported their children’s language development. The connecting idea was emphasizing collaborative parenting in whatever ways felt right for each individual family.
This provides reinforcement to the idea that when developing parent coaching interventions to help support children in their early language skills, the focus should be on what the parents are already doing that is working well and how can the intervention support and add to those skills.
There are several directions that this research could go from here and Alper and her team are already working on a few of them. They have already been collecting more specific data on parent characteristics in preparation to take a deeper look at which skills and knowledge sets provide the most impact on early language skills. The current study did not look into which specific skills were contributing to better outcomes rather it looked at the broader picture. In the long-term, Alper is hoping that her work can contribute to uncovering what supports language development and how can that information be leveraged to support children as they grow and learn.
“My ultimate goal is to hopefully build some sort of adaptive intervention design that is capable of determining where caregivers or parents might need help and what types of supports they might benefit from the most,” Alper says. “We have to see where the parents are at, what their perceptions and beliefs are, where the child is at, and then make decisions based on that.” ⏹
This study was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Award No. K23DC017763.
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