Interventions Aimed at Improving Child Language by Improving Maternal Responsivity

Maternal responsivity, or the ways in which mothers provide for, interact with, and respond to their children, helps to shape their children's development, including language development. In this chapter, we describe maternal responsivity as a multilevel construct with different measures appropriate for each level. Molar responsivity refers to aspects of interaction style such as affect that can best be measured with rating scales. Molecular responsivity refers to contingent maternal behaviors that occur in response to child behaviors; and are best reflected by the frequencies of occurrence of these contingent behaviors. Results of many studies have demonstrated that both molar and molecular responsivity are related to important child outcomes such as language development. Children of more responsive mothers tend to have better outcomes. Based on these findings, interventions aimed at improving maternal responsivity and thereby child language outcomes have been developed and investigated through a number of studies. Results have shown positive outcomes for maternal responsivity and lesser secondary benefits to child language outcomes. Some of the qualities that appear associated with better outcomes include timing the interventions to co-occur with specific developments in child behaviors, teaching over a span of approximately 10-12 sessions, and designing lessons to be culturally sensitive to individual families.