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Links between Shared Reading and Play, Parent Psychosocial Functioning, and Child Behavior: Evidence from a
Adriana Weisleder1, Carolyn Brockmeyer Cates2, Jessica F Harding3
1New York University School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, New York, NY; Northwestern University, Department of Communications Sciences and Disorders, Evanston, IL.
Insights
Parenting interventions promoting shared reading and play improve child behavior by enhancing cognitive stimulation and maternal well-being. These pathways help prevent child behavior problems in low-income families.
Area of Science:
- Child Development
- Pediatric Psychology
- Family Studies
Background:
- Child behavior problems are a significant concern in low-income populations.
- Parent-child interactions, particularly shared reading and play, are crucial for healthy development.
- Preventive interventions can target family processes to mitigate risks.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the mediating pathways through which a pediatric intervention impacts child behavior.
- To examine the roles of parental cognitive stimulation and maternal psychosocial functioning in intervention effects.
- To understand how family investment and stress pathways influence intervention outcomes.
Main Methods:
- Randomized controlled trial of the Video Interaction Project involving 362 low-income mother-child dyads.
- Intervention focused on promoting parent-child interactions in shared reading and play.
- Mediation analyses assessed parental cognitive stimulation, maternal stress, depressive symptoms, and child externalizing behaviors.
Main Results:
- Intervention effects on child behavior were mediated by improvements in cognitive stimulation and maternal psychosocial functioning.
- A sequential model demonstrated that early cognitive stimulation led to reduced maternal stress, which in turn improved child behavior.
- The Video Interaction Project significantly impacted child behavioral outcomes through these mediating family processes.
Conclusions:
- Parent-child interaction interventions can effectively improve child behavior by targeting specific family processes.
- Enhancing cognitive stimulation and maternal well-being are key pathways for intervention success.
- This study provides evidence for the mechanisms underlying the benefits of shared reading and play interventions.
Objective:
To investigate pathways by which interventions that promote shared reading and play help prevent child behavior problems. We examined whether family processes associated with the family investment pathway (eg, parental cognitive stimulation) and the family stress pathway (eg, mothers' psychosocial functioning) mediated impacts of a pediatric-based preventive intervention on child behavior.
Study Design:
The sample included 362 low-income mothers and their children who participated in a randomized controlled trial of the Video Interaction Project, a pediatrics-based preventive intervention that promotes parent-child interactions in the context of shared reading and play. Parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to group at birth. Three mediators-parental cognitive stimulation, maternal stress about the parent-child relationship, and maternal depressive symptoms-were assessed at child ages 6 and 36 months. The outcome, child externalizing behaviors, was assessed at 36 months. We used a series of path analytic models to examine how these family processes, separately or together, mediated the impacts of the Video Interaction Project on child behavioral outcomes.
Results:
Intervention impacts on child behavior were mediated by enhancements in cognitive stimulation and by improvements in mothers' psychosocial functioning. A sequential mediation model showed that Video Interaction Project impacts on cognitive stimulation at 6 months were associated with later decreases in mothers' stress about the parent-child relationship and that this pathway mediated intervention impacts on child behavioral outcomes at 3 years of age (P = .023).
Conclusions:
Using an experimental design, this study identifies pathways by which parent-child interactions in shared reading and play can improve child behavioral outcomes.
Trial Registration:
Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT00212576.
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