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Researchers to study program aimed at improving equity in children’s health in Kansas communities
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas researchers in early childhood development have been awarded a three-year, $300,000 grant to help improve language and communication skills in underserved communities. The researchers will work with the state of Kansas to measure a program known as Promoting Communication: Tools for Advancing Language in Kids (PC TALK) in a variety of community child care settings, from metropolitan Kansas City to rural Kansas communities, including child care centers that partner with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
Parental differential treatment affects sibling, family bonds, research finds
LAWRENCE — Here is some free, evidence-based parenting advice: Try at all costs not to discipline or otherwise treat your children differently, lest they grow up to resent it and each other. That is the main finding from a new study by two University of Kansas communication studies scholars, whose work was published in Family Relations, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Science.
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Contact: Christina Knott, Life Span Institute, [email protected], @kulifespan
Researchers to study program aimed at improving equity in children’s health in Kansas communities
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas researchers in early childhood development have been awarded a three-year, $300,000 grant to help improve language and communication skills in underserved communities, including dual language learners, those in racial minority groups and children with disabilities.
Funded by the Health and Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the project is focused on the intervention Promoting Communication: Tools for Advancing Language in Kids (PC TALK).
Researchers have previously shown that PC TALK is successful in at-home early intervention programs and with early education teachers in child care settings. The new study will evaluate the influence, as well as the cost-effectiveness, of PC TALK over time with the goal of improving equity in language learning opportunities in underserved communities. The project will be led by Dale Walker, research professor and senior scientist, and Kathy Bigelow, associate research professor, at the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, a KU Life Span Institute research center in Kansas City, Kansas.
The researchers will work with the state of Kansas to measure PC TALK in a variety of Kansas community child care settings in urban communities such as Wyandotte County and metropolitan Kansas City as well as in rural communities, including child care centers that partner with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, such as Early Head Start centers.
Walker said that the project addresses goals specified by HRSA and the Maternal and Child Health Bureau for rigorous evidence on effective interventions aimed at improving health equity among children.
“The purpose of this project is to document the efficacy of implementing the PC TALK intervention to partner with and build upon the capacity of early child care providers, to increase the language-learning opportunities that infants and young children experience,” Walker said. “Those opportunities are associated with language development and later school readiness.”
PC TALK is a toolkit for promoting language and communication in infants and young children including those with and at risk for developmental delay and disabilities. It is made up of eight communication strategies that can be used at home and in child care settings to provide opportunities to infants, toddlers and preschoolers to experience and practice language and communication naturally across routines and activities throughout the day.
“Ensuring that young children have ample opportunities to experience positive language-learning interactions is of primary importance,” Bigelow said.
Evidence suggests that children who benefit most from quality early intervention and care experiences are those who are at risk for poorer language and literacy outcomes due to systemic economic and learning inequities and other social determinants of health, she added. Early language exposure has been shown to have positive effects in vocabulary skills, school readiness, social integration, literacy and language skills by third grade and helps prevent problem behavior. Noting that nearly half of U.S. children under age 6 are enrolled in child care, documenting the efficacy of integrating PC TALK into early childhood programs has the potential to be a resource that can benefit large numbers of infants and children.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Parental differential treatment affects sibling, family bonds, research finds
LAWRENCE — Here is some free, evidence-based parenting advice: Try at all costs not to discipline or otherwise treat your children differently, lest they grow up to resent it and each other.
That is the main finding from a new study by two scholars in the University of Kansas Department of Communication Studies.
Using the retrospective reports of 325 college-age adults, the study found that parental differential treatment toward offspring and family cohesion work together to affect siblings’ relationship quality. Specifically, the overall family climate of emotional connectedness helps promote better sibling relationships.
With extreme levels of parental differential treatment, or PDT, however, some positive implications of family cohesion no longer exist for sibling relationship quality.
The authors of the study urged fathers, who often play a disciplinarian role, to be aware of this potential and to avoid it by treating siblings equally whenever possible. If circumstances make that impossible, they wrote, parents should explain why they are treating siblings differently.
“Young adults’ retrospective reports of family cohesion, parental differential treatment, and sibling relationships” was recently published online in Family Relations, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Science. Its authors are Weimiao Zhou and Alesia Woszidlo. Zhou recently graduated with her doctorate from KU’s communication studies department, where Woszidlo is an associate professor.
Informed by family-systems theory, the authors examined how parental differential treatment affected the relationship between family cohesion and sibling relationship outcomes.
PDT can consist of “differential affection (e.g., parents showing different amounts of love, warmth, and care to their children) and differential control (e.g., parents showing different amounts of controlling behavior such as disciplining, punishment, and blame to their children,” they write.
In the case of both mothers and fathers, PDT was found to negatively affect family cohesion and sibling relationship quality, the authors wrote. This is consistent with past research as well.
“But in this particular study, fathers’ differential treatment emerged as a more robust moderator, in comparison to mothers’, with regard to the strength (of the relationship) between cohesion and sibling relationship quality,” Zhou said.
For instance, the authors write, “The present study suggests that fathers who display different amounts of control (e.g., showing different amounts of strictness, blame, discipline, and punishment) toward two offspring is likely to weaken the positive effects of family cohesion on sibling affection.”
Family cohesion, Zhou said, “means that families have lots of routines that promote togetherness, as well as parents who try to treat children as equal. Those two factors work together to promote the siblings’ relationships.”
Treating siblings equally does not always mean treating them exactly the same, according to the authors. Sometimes differential treatment is warranted and needed, they wrote, especially when siblings differ in age or have varying developmental needs.
“It’s OK to show differentiation,” Zhou said. “It’s just maybe that fathers need to provide more information about why they engage in differential treatment to help their children process the reasoning part of PDT, so as to reduce that kind of negative effects … to help the siblings to have pro-social behaviors and more positive interactions.”
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