Building Bridges to Overcome Widening Gaps: Challenges in Addressing the Need for Professional Preparation of Infant-Toddler Practitioners in Higher Education

As the professional qualifications for those working with infants, toddlers, and their families continue to expand, institutes of higher education (IHEs) play an increasingly vital role in training the infant/toddler workforce. However, IHEs face numerous programming and pedagogical issues that make meeting the needs of these professionals difficult. These issues are further complicated by persistent challenges within early care and education. In this paper, we examine these issues in detail and discuss the Collaborative for Understanding the Pedagogy of Infant/toddler Development (CUPID), a cross-institution partnership working to enhance the quality of infant/toddler professional preparation in higher education

Attachment Predicts College Students’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Skills for Working with Infants, Toddlers, and Families

Research Findings:Adults’ attitudes about attachment relationships are central to how they perceive and respond to children. However, little is known about how attachment styles are related to teachers’ attitudes toward and interactions with infants and toddlers. From a survey of 207 students taking early childhood (EC) courses at 4 U.S. universities, we report relations among students’ attachment styles and their (a) career goals, (b) attitudes about caring for and educating infants and young children, and (c) interaction skills for responding in developmentally supportive ways. Overall, attachment security was positively associated with career goals focused on working with younger children, knowledge about infant/toddler development, attitudes that acknowledge the importance of adult support in children’s development, and developmentally supportive interaction skills. Students who scored high on attachment fearfulness minimized the importance of adults in children’s lives, minimized the importance of the early years for later learning, and endorsed strict and controlling forms of child guidance. Practice or Policy: A conceptual mediation model linking a path from attachment to caregiving skill through knowledge and attitudes is articulated. We propose a person-centered pedagogy for infant/toddler professional preparation that provides opportunities for reflection on one’s own attachment and its effects on work with young childre

Maltreated children use more grammatical negations

Many studies reveal a strong impact of childhood maltreatment on language development, mainly resulting in shorter utterances, less rich vocabulary, or a delay in grammatical complexity. However, different theories suggest the possibility for resilience – a positive adaptation to an otherwise adverse environment – in children who experienced childhood maltreatment. Here, we investigated different measures for language development in spontaneous speech, examining whether childhood maltreatment leads to a language deficit only or whether it can also result in differences in language use due to a possible adaptation to a toxic environment. We compared spontaneous speech during therapeutic peer-play sessions of 32 maltreated and 32 non-maltreated children from the same preschool and equivalent in gender, age (2 to 5 years), home neighborhood, ethnicity, and family income. Maltreatment status was reported by formal child protection reports, and corroborated by independent social service reports. We investigated general language sophistication (i.e., vocabulary, talkativeness, mean length of utterance), as well as grammatical development (i.e., use of plurals, tense, grammatical negations). We found that maltreated and non-maltreated children showed similar sophistication across all linguistic measures, except for the use of grammatical negations. Maltreated children used twice as many grammatical negations as non-maltreated children. The use of this highly complex grammatical structure shows an advanced linguistic skill, which shows that childhood maltreatment does not necessarily lead to a language deficit. The result might indicate the development of a negativity bias in the structure of spontaneous language due to an adaptation to their experiences

Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses

To understand neurological complications of COVID-19 better both acutely and for recovery, we measured markers of brain injury, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 hospitalised participants; 111 with acute sera (1–11 days post-admission) and 92 convalescent sera (56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses). Here we show that compared to 60 uninfected controls, tTau, GFAP, NfL, and UCH-L1 are increased with COVID-19 infection at acute timepoints and NfL and GFAP are significantly higher in participants with neurological complications. Inflammatory mediators (IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) are associated with both altered consciousness and markers of brain injury. Autoantibodies are more common in COVID-19 than controls and some (including against MYL7, UCH-L1, and GRIN3B) are more frequent with altered consciousness. Additionally, convalescent participants with neurological complications show elevated GFAP and NfL, unrelated to attenuated systemic inflammatory mediators and to autoantibody responses. Overall, neurological complications of COVID-19 are associated with evidence of neuroglial injury in both acute and late disease and these correlate with dysregulated innate and adaptive immune responses acutely

Diferencias en sensibilidad parental entre madres y padres de Chile y USA

There have been reported some gender differences in diverse parenthood aspects, but still there is no consensus among the authors regarding of sensitivity's expression. Sensitivity is the ability to attend, read and respond appropriately to the child needs. As a dyadic ability, it is influenced by contextual and individual factors of the adult and child involved, and the adult's gender and nationality could be one of those. The goal was to compare father's and mother's sensitivity expression with their children of one year old, in Chile and in US. 38 dyads (19 Chileans and 19 Americans), were assessed with the Adult Sensitivity Scale. Descriptive and comparative analyses were made for gender and nationality variables. There were no significant differences by gender when comparing the whole sample, but when separated analysis where made by country, Chile showed greater differences than US, where fathers have significantly higher scores than mothers in Chile, while US mothers show a trend. The US sample showed higher sensitivity than the Chilean sample, and mothers showed greater differences than the fathers.Se han observado diferencias de género en distintas áreas de parentalidad, pero aún no existe consenso sobre estas diferencias en la expresión de sensibilidad. Sensibilidad es la capacidad de atender, interpretar y responder adecuadamente a las necesidades del niño. Como variable diádica, es influida por factores contextuales e individuales del adulto y niño que conforman la díada, y género y nacionalidad del adulto podrían ser algunos de ellos. El objetivo fue comparar expresión de sensibilidad de padres y madres con sus hijos de un año, en Chile y U.S.A. 38 díadas de padres y madres (19 chilenas y 19 estadounidenses) fueron evaluadas con la Escala de Sensibilidad del Adulto. Se realizaron análisis descriptivos y comparativos de las variables género y nacionalidad. No aparecen diferencias por género en muestra total, pero al compáralos intra-país, Chile presenta más diferencias que U.S.A., siendo estas significativas a favor de los padres en Chile y tendencias a favor de las madres en U.S.A. La muestra estadounidense obtuvo mayor sensibilidad que la chilena, y las madres presentaron mayores diferencias entre sí que los padres.

Parenting supports for early vocabulary development: Specific effects of sensitivity and stimulation through infancy

Growing recognition of disparities in early childhood language environments prompts examination of parent–child interactions, which support vocabulary. Research links parental sensitivity and cognitive stimulation to child language, but has not explicitly contrasted their effects, nor examined how effects may change over time. We examined maternal sensitivity and stimulation throughout infancy using two observational methods—ratings of parents’ interaction qualities and coding of discrete parenting behaviors—to assess the relative importance of these qualities to child vocabulary over time and determine whether mothers make related changes in response to children\u27s development. Participants were 146 infants and mothers, assessed when infants were 14, 24, and 36 months. At 14 months, sensitivity had a stronger effect on vocabulary than did stimulation, but the effect of stimulation grew throughout toddlerhood. Mothers’ cognitive stimulation grew over time, whereas sensitivity remained stable. While discrete parenting behaviors changed with child age, there was no evidence of trade-offs between sensitive and stimulating behaviors, and no evidence that sensitivity moderated the effect of stimulation on child vocabulary. Findings demonstrate specificity of timing in the link between parenting qualities and child vocabulary, which could inform early parent interventions, and support a reconceptualization of the nature and measurement of parental sensitivity

Attachment Predicts College Students’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Skills for Working with Infants, Toddlers, and Families

Research Findings:Adults’ attitudes about attachment relationships are central to how they perceive and respond to children. However, little is known about how attachment styles are related to teachers’ attitudes toward and interactions with infants and toddlers. From a survey of 207 students taking early childhood (EC) courses at 4 U.S. universities, we report relations among students’ attachment styles and their (a) career goals, (b) attitudes about caring for and educating infants and young children, and (c) interaction skills for responding in developmentally supportive ways. Overall, attachment security was positively associated with career goals focused on working with younger children, knowledge about infant/toddler development, attitudes that acknowledge the importance of adult support in children’s development, and developmentally supportive interaction skills. Students who scored high on attachment fearfulness minimized the importance of adults in children’s lives, minimized the importance of the early years for later learning, and endorsed strict and controlling forms of child guidance. Practice or Policy: A conceptual mediation model linking a path from attachment to caregiving skill through knowledge and attitudes is articulated. We propose a person-centered pedagogy for infant/toddler professional preparation that provides opportunities for reflection on one’s own attachment and its effects on work with young childre

Attachment Predicts College Students\u27 Knowledge, Attitudes, and Skills for Working with Infants, Toddlers, and Families

Research Findings: Adults’ attitudes about attachment relationships are central to how they perceive and respond to children. However, little is known about how attachment styles are related to teachers’ attitudes toward and interactions with infants and toddlers. From a survey of 207 students taking early childhood (EC) courses at 4 U.S. universities, we report relations among students’ attachment styles and their (a) career goals, (b) attitudes about caring for and educating infants and young children, and (c) interaction skills for responding in developmentally supportive ways. Overall, attachment security was positively associated with career goals focused on working with younger children, knowledge about infant/toddler development, attitudes that acknowledge the importance of adult support in children’s development, and developmentally supportive interaction skills. Students who scored high on attachment fearfulness minimized the importance of adults in children’s lives, minimized the importance of the early years for later learning, and endorsed strict and controlling forms of child guidance. Practice or Policy: A conceptual mediation model linking a path from attachment to caregiving skill through knowledge and attitudes is articulated. We propose a person-centered pedagogy for infant/toddler professional preparation that provides opportunities for reflection on one’s own attachment and its effects on work with young children. © 2015 Taylor & Franci