The Influence of Maternal Age, Employment Status, and Parenthood Status on Children's Cognitive Development

Research and theory tend to agree when suggesting that certain activities done by mothers have both immediate and delayed consequences for children's mental development in the first years of life. The everyday interaction between an infant and a caregiver can be broken down into many categories. There are data linking both of these types of interaction to the mental development of children. The study will focus on the extent to which maternal characteristics (age, employment status, parenthood status, and birth order of the child) influence the relation between maternal social and didactic caregiving and the social and mental development of children. Mother-infant interaction will be observed when the infants are 5 months old. When the children are 20 months old, measures of toddler function (e.g., ability to play and language development) and maternal behavior (e.g., encouragement of attention to the environment and I.Q.) will be obtained. When the children are 48 months old, researchers will measure preschooler psychosocial functioning (e.g., I.Q., cognitive and social competencies) and maternal behavior (e.g., "scaffolding"). Understanding the relation between children's experiences as infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and their eventual intellectual and social functioning is an essential part of normal developmental research.\<TAB\>