Caregiver Infant Interactions

10 Key excerpts on "Caregiver Infant Interactions"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Art and Practice of Home Visiting

  • Ruth E Cook, Shirley N Sparks(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Brookes Publishing

    (Publisher)

  It should be noted that any kind of joint attention activities for children and caregivers should be encouraged when there have been none. In this instance, caregivers should not have to worry that they are doing it the right or wrong way. Extensive research has found relationships between the particular nature of caregiver–child interaction and a broad range of social, emotional, cognitive, and communicative characteristics and outcomes in children. It is now considered best practice to support the caregiver–child relationship in order to improve developmental outcomes (Sansavini et al., 2015).

  Therefore, home visitors must become keenly aware of the interaction between caregivers and children. That is, they must carefully observe the caregiver’s ability to perceive infant signals, to interpret them correctly, and then appropriately respond to them (Provenzi et al., 2018).

  Infant Communication Signals

  As we have seen, the dynamic interactions between infant and caregiver that are so vital to the development of attachment begin at birth and perhaps before birth (with the mother reacting to movement patterns from the fetus). The infant has an equal part to play in this interaction. Previously, the entire burden for the interaction was thought to rest with the caregiver. The interaction depends on the competence of both members of the dyad. In early stages, infants give cues that tell caregivers when they are ready for interactions and caregivers learn to read them. If caregivers try to interact when the infant is not receptive, the caregiver may read this as a rejection. The home visitor can help caregivers read infant cues as illustrated in Table 4.1

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Interaction in Human Development

  • Marc H. Bornstein, Jerome S. Bruner(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  What kinds of people children are, and what kinds of adults children become when they grow up, reflect children's native capacities in complex continuing interplay with the diversity of early interactions they provoke and those that are provided for them. Research suggests that specific interaction experiences at specific points in the life cycle affect specific aspects of human growth in specific ways. From this perspective, caretaking plays a formative role in development. Thus, whether the child instigates different modes of interaction or, in the child's phenomenology, interactions arrive deus ex machina, the significance of the nature and timing of interactions the child experiences early in development cannot be underestimated. Even if some human characteristics are inborn and persist or modulate through time as a reflection of biological endowment, others originate and develop on account of experience, and development proceeds on the interplay of endowed attributes in the context of interactions experienced.

  Two major perspectives within developmental study, those of Piaget (e.g., 1926) and of Vygotsky (e.g., 1962 , 1978), hold that mental advance in childhood develops principally out of interpersonal exchanges, normally experiences that take place in natural interactions with caretaker (Kuhn, 1988 ; Tudge & Rogoff, 1989 ). However, patterns of caretaker interaction that influence children's development, especially their mental growth, are only presently undergoing taxonomic classification (e.g., Bornstein, 1988 ; The Consortium for Longitudinal Study, 1983; Gottfried, 1984 ; Wachs & Gruen, 1982 ): That is, an important movement in developmental psychology has the goals of identification, specification, and operationalization of categories of caretaking.

  In practice, caretaker-infant interaction is intricate and multidimensional, and mothers and fathers regularly engage in combinations of caretaking. Many categories of caretaking interactions may be identified, including prominently nurturant, material, social, and didactic (Bornstein, 1988 ). This chapter features two, the social and didactic.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Dance/Movement Therapy for Infants and Young Children with Medical Illness

  Treating Somatic and Psychic Distress

  • Suzi Tortora, Miri Keren(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1

  The Role of the Baby’s Body, Nonverbal-Movement Experience, and Communication in Building the Caregiver-Baby Relationship

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003134800-2

  Introduction

  Parents who are attuned and responsive to their baby’s nonverbal actions enable the baby to feel his actions are communicative and have been seen and heard. Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially significant in establishing developmental psychology and object relations theory, highlights the parents’ role in his simple statement: “When I look I am seen, so I exist” (1982 , p. 16). From the infant’s point of view, this quote describes the experience of engaging with a nurturing mother figure. It also acknowledges how a baby comes to gain a sense of herself through early action-based experiences with primary caregivers. The act of looking, which requires a physical motion, informs the baby’s emotional and social formation of self. Through this emotionally rich, bodily felt exchange, the baby understands that she matters, and this is at the heart of building a healthy sense of self in relationship to others.

  The capacity for attunement requires emotional availability on the part of the caregiver/parent. Any very stressful situation, such as a serious pediatric illness, may compromise the parents’ availability and unconsciously undermine the infant’s sense of self. This chapter explains the significant role the felt, bodily experience plays in psychological development, focusing on how the young child’s psyche – body, mind, soul, and spirit – develops within the context of a newly forming parent–child relationship and how it may be affected by complex medical experiences.

  Throughout this book, early research on the mother figure is presented to accurately describe how these theories and findings relate to the pediatric patient’s experience, while taking into consideration the important role all significant caregivers play in a young child’s life. The word “mother” will be used when referencing classic research, specifically with mothers and babies; the terms “mother figure,” “parents,” “caregiver,” and “significant caregivers” will be used interchangeably to be inclusive of other meaningful relationships in the baby’s world, which can be especially important in the early life of a baby with a medical illness.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Contemporary Perspectives on Research in Assessment and Evaluation in Early Childhood Education

  • Olivia Saracho(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  We also limit our discussion to measures that were developed (or have been adapted) specifically for use in center-based infant/toddler classrooms, although some have also been used in multiple settings such as family childcare programs or children’s homes. A note about terminology: In this review, we refer to the early childhood professionals who work with infants and toddlers in center-based programs as caregivers, a term we consider interchangeable with infant care teachers. We choose this term because supporting the learning and development of very young children involves a greater level of care (e.g., engaging in per- sonal care routines, providing comfort during times of distress) than with older children. In comparison, the term teacher emphasizes the adult’s role in providing academic and instructional support to children and while it is not exactly synonymous with caregiver, it is the term used by many of the measures described in this chapter; therefore, for the purposes of the cur- rent discussion, we also use caregiver and teacher to mean approximately the same thing. ASSESSING CAREGIVER–CHILD INTERACTIONS AIS The Adult Involvement Scale (AIS) (Howes & Stewart, 1987) rates the in- tensity of caregiver–child involvement (Howes, 2010) by rating the caregiv- er’s behavior with the target child when the caregiver and child are within

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Blackwell Handbook of Infant Development

  • J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Fogel(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  A better understanding of the nature of the human being is afforded by examining mother–infant interaction and its consequences in the period of the dyad’s initial accommodation – the unique and spe- cific influences of mother on infant and of infant on mother. Mother–infant interactions command attention for several reasons. First, they are sig- nificant in themselves because infancy is a critical period in the life cycle, characterized by noteworthy developments in emotional, social, communicative, and cognitive com- petencies. Mother–infant interactions serve as the prime context for these early achieve- ments. Second, who infants are and what they do influence their social interactions with mothers, and in indirect ways infants affect their own development. Third, the experi- ences of infancy (separate from continuing post-infancy experiences) are principally pro- vided by mothers and may endure, influencing the rate, course, and perhaps eventual resting level of subsequent development. Focus on mother–infant interaction is also por- tentous for practical reasons. Appreciating factors that affect infant development (as well as those that do not) promises to inform efforts at intervention and remediation. Infancy is a time of vulnerability; it is formative in habit development; and it may be founda- tional for decision making for the balance of the life course. As Winnicott (1965) keenly observed, infants cannot exist alone. Rather, infants can exist only with their mothers (or other caregivers). In turn, infants and mothers do not exist alone, but are embedded in larger social contexts that include family members, com- munities, social class, and culture. Moreover, mothers change in their persons and posi- tions, and infants constantly develop, and each influences the other so that elements of who infants were yesterday, who they are today, and who they will be tomorrow are in constant transformation.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Development Through Life

  A Psychosocial Approach

  • Barbara Newman, Philip Newman(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Although some research has been carried out to compare attach-ment to mothers and fathers, or mothers and caregivers, the focus is on a dyadic attachment. However, in many cultures, the infant is cared for by a cluster or collective of older siblings, cousins, aunts, fathers, and uncles, as well as the mother and other specially designated caregivers. In these cultures, the ability of the child to feel safe and secure depends on the coordinated care of many members of the family or village rather than exclusive care by the mother. The strange situation in particular and the attachment paradigm more generally do not capture the fluid nature of this collective care-giving context and the degree to which it is effective in supporting a child’s feelings of safety and security (Lewis, 2005). 3. Infant–caregiver interactions can be understood as an introduction to the nature of valued social relation-ships which, over time, will contribute to the child’s survival and successful integration into the social community. One of the assumptions of the attachment framework is that a secure attachment provides a safe harbor from which the child feels free to explore the environment. From this view, attachment is a foun-dation for subsequent independence. However, au-tonomy, exploration, and self-reliance are not primary goals of socialization in all cultures. Societies marked by greater value for interdependence view the forma-tion of infant attachment as a precursor to obedience, intragroup harmony, and acceptance of cultural norms and values. Thus, while the need to ensure the survival of the young through sensitive and responsive care may be a cultural universal, the socialization goals that follow from the formation of a secure attachment may differ from one culture to the next depending At 3 months of age, infants can communicate their emotional state using different facial expressions.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Handbook of Language Socialization

  • Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, Bambi B. Schieffelin, Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, Bambi B. Schieffelin(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  However, the evidence for universal underpinnings of interaction has to be reconciled with evidence for cultural specificity in interactional patterns, both in adult interaction and infant–caregiver interaction. This includes cultural differences in adult gaze patterns, conversational feedback mechanisms, and even in pointing behavior (e.g. Brown and Levinson 2005; Kita 2003, 2009; Rossano, Brown, and Levinson 2009). The anthropological and cross-cultural psychological literature on childhood provides abundant evidence for cultural variation in how infants are handled and socially engaged in their first year. Both the amount of interaction with infants and the features of the prelinguistic situation vary radically depending on social organization, household composition, socioeconomic activities of mothers and other caregivers, parental beliefs and cultural models, and ecological conditions – for example, mortality. These conditions influence the details of everyday experience for infants, from the physical arrangements of their handling (swaddling, feeding, degree of physical freedom) to the amount and nature of interactiveness: the positioning of babies as interlocutors whose ‘utterances’ are intentional communications, the amount of eye contact, turn-taking, and the kinds of participation structures into which an infant is drawn (de León 1998; see also de León, this volume). Interactional patterns are also influenced by adult beliefs about childhood and child rearing, including the contrast between child-centered versus situation-centered societies (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984) and, analogously, Lancy’s (2008) distinction between gerontocracy (child-supported) and neontocracy (child-centered) societies.

  Very little infancy research1 has examined the contextualized sequential details of infant–caregiver interactions during the first year of life. Modern theories of infant development (e.g. Bruner 1975a, 1975b, 1982; Elman et al. 1996; Masataka 2003b; Tomasello 1999, 2008) emphasize the influence of particular interactional practices in the child’s developing communicative skills, claiming that the child’s entry into social understanding is grounded in communication with others and that the extent and nature of social interaction a child experiences influence the development of his or her social understanding. But these theories have not taken sufficiently into account the implications of the fact that interactional practices with infants widely differ and are culturally shaped by beliefs about what infants need and what they can understand at different ages.

  The current focus of infancy research on joint attention (see e.g. Moore and Dunham 1995) provides the basis for a set of predictions that can be fruitfully examined in cross-cultural interactional data. The critical age for coordinating attention in infancy – identified in the extensive developmental literature for infants in postindustrial societies – is between about 9 and 15 months, when major social-cognitive abilities emerge, including awareness of the other as an intentional agent and joint attention with a caregiver over a third object or event, referred to as the ‘referential triangle’ (Tomasello 1999). Around 12 months there is an important developmental milestone: babies look where adults are looking reliably, use adults as social reference points (gaze at them to check what to do in uncertain situations), act on objects like adults do, and actively direct adult attention through indicative gestures and pointing (Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello 1998). All of these are (putatively) essential prerequisites for coordinated interaction and later for learning language. The argument is that joint attention, arising out of social processes that are more basic than language, creates a base for referential communication.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Development in Infancy

  • Martha E. Arterberry, Marc H. Bornstein(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 .

  KEY TERMS

  Attachments

  specific, enduring emotional bonds, the first of which are often with parents

  CHAPTER OVERVIEW

  Development of attachment

  Individual differences in attachment

  Attachment across cultural contexts

  Parent–infant interaction

  Gender stereotypes and socialization

  What are the phases of caregiver–infant attachment?

  A number of developmental theories emphasize the importance of child–caregiver interactions, but no theory has been as enduring as that formulated by Bowlby (1969 ; Grojman-de-Millan et al., 2017 ; Thompson et al., 2021 ). Bowlby, a psychoanalyst, was impressed by the capacity of ethological theorists to explain early emotional communications and the formation of social bonds in nonhuman species. (Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, often making cross-species comparisons.) One assumption of the ethological perspective is that the behavioral propensities of infants and parents are best considered in the context of the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” in which our species evolved. There the survival of infants depended on their ability to maintain proximity to protective adults to obtain nourishment, comfort, and security. Unlike the young of many other species, human infants are unable to move closer to or physically follow adults for several months after birth, and they are even incapable of clinging to adults to stay in contact. Instead, human infants have to rely on signals of various sorts to entice adults to approach and stay near them. For these signals to be effective, adults must be predisposed to respond to them. A good example of such a signal is crying, which very effectively entices adults to approach, pick up, talk to, and soothe infants (Bornstein et al., 2017 ; Esposito & Bornstein, 2019 ; Yoo et al., 2018

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Cambridge Handbook of Environment in Human Development

  • Linda Mayes, Michael Lewis(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In fact, the mother plays a profound role in emotional coregu- lation during this period, but unlike the preceding phases, mother and infant now have much more flexibility in the way that they respond to one another (Sroufe, 1995): Maternal care is no less important than in earlier periods, but the terms of the relation- ship have shifted. The nature of the dyad’s relationship can be understood in various ways at this time, and it is useful to adopt different lenses to complement the infant’s newfound capacities. Consider the importance of the attach- ment relationship at this time. The func- tion of the attachment behavioral system, as conceptualized by Bowlby (1969/1997), is to promote the protection and survival of the infant, and ultimately the species, via the maintenance of proximity with the primary caregiver. This is achieved through behaviors that put the caregiver into contact with the infant (e.g., crying, smiling), main- tain contact (e.g., clinging), or, later on, put the infant in contact with the caregiver (e.g., locomotion). But a simple reading of attach- ment in terms of physical proximity soon breaks down. Indeed, attachment needs have to be balanced with the motivation to explore the environment at the very least. Thus, by 12 months attachment behaviors encompass substantial flexibility and may accommodate various degrees of proximity to the caregiver. For example, some envi- ronmental threats may cause the infant to require full physical contact, whereas others may simply require a reassuring glance. The attachment system as described here is fun- damental in that it should be observed in all infants given the sustained availability of a caregiver. Bowlby’s insights were pro- found and simple: The infant needs a pri- mary attachment figure and, by this stage, it is typically the mother.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Child Care in the Family

  A Review of Research and Some Propositions for Policy

  • Alison Clarke-Stewart(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Children who smiled a lot at their mothers at 11 months, for example, were ob- served to have mothers who smiled at them more often at 16 months. Still, one cannot simply conclude that mother-child social interaction is determined solely by the infant's disposition to smile. Interaction is not only immediately reciprocal, but the direction of influence is re- 32 II. RESEARCH ciprocal over time; first one then the other person influences the behavior of his or her partner. The mother's attention to the infant leads to his attachment to her, which in turn increases her attentive- ness, and so on. The frequency of young children's negative emotional behavior is also related to maternal care. By the end of the first year, the infant's cry reflects the history of his mother's responsiveness to his distress, more than it does constitutional factors such as irritability or sootha- bility, the effectiveness of the mother's soothing, or the sheer amount of physical contact with the mother. The frequency of crying is nega- tively related to the promptness and responsiveness of the mother's soothing behavior and the tender quality of her physical care. Nega- tive behavior (crying, fretting, behaving aggressively) is related also to the frequency of the mother's ignoring, rejecting, scolding, hitting, commanding, and restrictive holding. In sum, the relationship formed in this age period between the child and the mother or other primary figure is a central and essential one in the child's social development. Mutual attachment evolves through their frequent playful, positive and reciprocal interaction.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book