Families as Facilitators of Children’s Intellectual Development at 3 Years of Age

Abstract

The intellectual development of the young child and the factors that influence its course are concerns that have long occupied the minds of psychologists, educators, and parents. The recent history of research on families as learning environments spans a broad range: from the clinical investigations of the 1930s on the grim effects of institutionalization to the studies that compared groups of children whose child-rearing experiences had differed on some single, presumably central dimension such as feeding practices or toilet training to the current approach that began in the 1950s and seeks to quantify and measure many aspects of the home environment and to relate these to the child’s behavior and development (Clarke-Stewart, 1977). Much useful information has been derived from this research, but a limitation of many of the studies is that typically each has examined a narrow set of variables rather than models based on more complex patterns of relationships that might reflect with greater accuracy the child’s experiences in the family. Moreover, even those studies that have examined large numbers of variables simultaneously have not been designed to yield conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships.