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Long before their babies can talk, some parents communicate with their children through a vocabulary of gestures--patting the head for hat, for example, or stroking the arm lightly for kitten.
Parents typically introduce the gestures to their children, though sometimes it happens the other way around, with infants creating their own gestures and sharing them with their parents.
Such gestures are known as baby signs--and the research on the effectiveness of the gestures has been pioneered by UC Davis psychology professor Linda Acredolo and her collaborator, Susan Goodwyn, a professor at California State University, Stanislaus.
A few years ago, Acredolo and Goodwyn collaborated on a how-to book for parents who wanted to use the gestures with their children before their kids could talk. Their work has put them into the national media spotlight.
In tests of young children who'd used baby signs, Acredolo and Goodwyn found that signing accelerates the process of learning to talk, stimulates intellectual development, enhances self-esteem and strengthens the child-parent bond. They found that signing babies "scored higher in intelligence tests, understood more words, had larger vocabularies and engaged in more sophisticated play," Acredolo says.
Baby signs are put into practice at the campus's Center for Child and Family Studies (see article on page 26) and evaluated for their use in group situations. At the center, infant and toddler academic specialist Kathleen Grey has introduced the use of gestures among the children and teachers. She now gets calls from across the country from other day-care providers interested in the signing system.
"Gesturing enhances the quality of the relationship. It fosters respect toward children and slows down the pace, creating a slow dance of reciprocal communication between adults and children," Grey says.
On a spring day at the center, Grey and the other caregivers use the sign for "outside"--gesturing with their hands as if turning a doorknob--to let the infants know it is time to go out and play.
Earlier this year, in a preliminary study, Acredolo and Goodwyn analyzed more data to learn the impact that baby signs might have on the children once they reached the early grades of school. And what they found was impressive: Children who'd used the baby signs have intellectual advantages even as they grow older.
The children, who were tested when they were 7 and 8 years old, were shown to perform significantly better on standard IQ tests than those who hadn't learned the gestures, Acredolo says. "Not only do the gestures promote language and intellectual skills and family relationships during infancy and toddlerhood, they also can serve children's intellectual growth into elementary school."
A possible explanation for the finding? Early brain stimulation builds intellectual and neurological foundations that carry over into school age, Goodwyn says.
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To demonstrate how important it is to consider a child's attachment to parent or caregiver, Carol Rodning suggests taking an example from physics.
"If you think of a glass full of water, you wouldn't analyze the molecules, the structure of the water and its relationship to the glass without analyzing the glass itself. All must be considered.
"We need to know much more about the family context and how relationships within it infiuence decision-making, altruism, empathy, the healthy aspects of relationships and the negative aspects of the family relationship."
When Rodning traces back her interest in early childhood development, she recalls that she wanted to be either a detective or a physician and to work with children. "I wanted to see how unrelated things come together and create understandable patterns."
She became a developmental psychologist, employing observational skills
along the way, she says, to "demonstrate how centrally significant relationships
are to development and, therefore, to our society."
Rodning directs the Center for Child and Family Studies and is known for her early studies at UCLA of drug-addicted mothers and their babies, conducted through in-home observations of mothers, their partners and their children.
Rodning and her co-researchers looked at attachment in families and across generations, and the effect on the child's development.
What they found is that prenatal cocaine exposure and other prenatal risks and social disruption can lead to disorganized play and difficulty in establishing social relationships in toddlerhood. The findings are described in a textbook, Child Development: Its Nature and Course, co-authored by University of Minnesota researcher L. Alan Sroufe and others.
The same book notes that Rodning and her co-researchers found that prenatally drug-exposed infants are more likely to be avoidant in their attachment--that is, they would avoid their mothers after a separation of a few minutes, and/or to have disorganized attachment, appearing dazed or disoriented around their mothers.
A National Institute of Mental Health-funded follow-up study in which Rodning participated along with colleagues at UCLA is just being published, Rodning says. This new study shows that intervention with high-risk families during a child's first year can infiuence how a child forms an attachment to a parent.
"By starting early, the intervention has a very powerful infiuence on how the child and parent understand the attachment relationship. This is a first, and it's very significant data that supports the belief that beginning earlier is more powerful," Rodning says.
Such intervention--achieved through working with the parent and providing information about potential attachment red fiags--helps parents understand their children's behavior over time, realize the importance of physical contact and learn how to comfort their children, Rodning says. For example, parents learn through intervention that when a baby is interested in the outside world, that doesn't mean a baby is rejecting the parent. "Such parents misinterpret the child's behavior, attributing meaning that isn't there," Rodning says.
What Rodning and her colleagues found relates to the work of Robin Hansen, a UC Davis medical school professor and clinician in developmental and behavioral pediatrics. Along with providing good medical care for children, Hansen is interested in their development and learning.
Over the years, she has worked to provide parents of prenatally drug-exposed babies with comprehensive support for their babies' physical and emotional development, at the same time helping them acquire parenting skills so they can, for example, read their babies' cues and respond consistently. She has found through her studies, which follow infants into childhood, that a child's temperament affects parenting. She also has found that parents must appreciate and understand those individual differences between children.
"We developed a program to provide information to parents based on temperament-related behavioral issues specific to each child," Hansen says.
Another of Hansen's research areas is autism and other neuro developmental disorders. She is among a group of UC Davis researchers who will be affiliated with the newly created UC Davis M.I.N.D. (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders) Institute. The institute was established to help campus researchers study the spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, cerebral palsy and learning disabilities. Baby sleep researcher Tom Anders will serve as acting director of the institute, where he will continue his study of sleep disorders in children.
Anders is building on his pathbreaking work begun in the 1960s and '70s to better understand sleep problems and other regulatory disorders like excessive crying. He wants to learn how these disorders affect infants' relationships with their parents and how those relationships affect the disorders.
In studies led by psychology researcher Beth Goodlin-Jones, researchers Anders and Hansen are measuring the extent of such regulation problems in babies and the levels of depression in mothers. In earlier work, Goodlin-Jones and Anders found that mothers with higher levels of depressive feelings have children with less-regulated sleep patterns.
This inquiry into mother and baby mental health follows naturally from Anders' ongoing National Institutes of Health-funded project to see if a T-shirt with the mother's scent might serve as a sleep aid for infants. Earlier in his career, Anders had found that babies who used sleep aids--a pacifier, a special blanket--tended to soothe themselves to sleep better than babies who didn't use such comforts.
While it doesn't appear that the T-shirts directly help the babies, Anders is finding the shirts do have an unexpected effect: Simply by wearing the T-shirts and then placing them in their babies' cribs, the mothers are feeling better.
"When we look at depression and 'hassle' data from the moms, we find that moms who have placed their T-shirts into their babies' beds feel less stressed. I believe this better feeling gets translated into happier feelings for the babies."
It may turn out that something as simple as a mother placing her T-shirt in her baby's crib can relieve some of her stress and depression, which will help the baby to sleep better and, in general, improve the baby's self-regulation. And that, in turn, would reduce health-care spending and alleviate suffering and distress for both parents and babies, the researchers say. This relationship between the mother feeling better about what she's doing for the baby and the baby then sleeping better is "an amazing result," Anders says, "showing the transaction between parent and child."
And no electrodes were needed for that discovery. Just quiet, unobtrusive, time-lapse videotaping.
Photos: Debbie Aldridge and Sam Woo/UC Davis CCS
