A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's early gesture and vocabulary development

Abstract

Socioeconomic disparities in children's early vocabulary skills can be traced back to disparities in gesture use at age one and are due, in part, to the quantity and quality of communication children are exposed to by parents. Further, parents' mindsets about intelligence contribute to their interactions with their children. We implemented a parent gesture intervention with a growth mindset component with 47 parents of 10‐month‐olds to determine whether this approach would increase parents' use of the pointing gesture, infants' use of pointing, and child vocabulary growth. The intervention had an effect on parent gesture such that by child age 12‐months, parents who received the intervention increased in their pointing more than parents in the control condition. Importantly, the intervention also had a significant effect on child gesture use with parents. There was no main effect of the intervention on child vocabulary. Further, the effect of the intervention on pointing was stronger for parents who endorsed fixed mindsets at baseline, and had an added benefit of increased vocabulary growth from 10–18 months for children of those parents who endorsed fixed mindsets. Incorporating growth mindset approaches into parenting interventions is encouraged.

Does Intention Matter? Relations between Parent Pointing, Infant Pointing, and Developing Language Ability

“…In summary, by the end of their first year, infants produce points with a variety of communicative intentions (e.g., Liszkowski et al, 2004Liszkowski et al, , 2008 and while pointing overall is a predictor of their growing language skills (e.g., Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009b), declarative pointing is a stronger predictor than imperative pointing (Colonnesi et al, 2010). Additionally, parents' overall pointing production is related to their infants' pointing (Liszkowski & Tomasello, 2011;Rowe, 2000), and increasing parent pointing can lead to increases in infant pointing (LeBarton et al, 2015;Rowe & Leech, 2018). However, it is unknown whether parent declarative versus imperative points might differentially relate to the kinds of points their infants produce or to their infants' language development.…”

“…These findings suggest that observational experience of points (via the parent) may potentially influence an infants' understanding of how pointing can be used to manipulate the attention state of others. In a similar study, Rowe and Leech (2018) trained parents of 10-month-olds on the importance of pointing with their infants, the role pointing plays in language development, and how they can make a difference in their infants' development by pointing with them often. Parents in the training group were provided with toys and told to play and point for 15 minutes a day with their infant.…”

Parent coaching increases conversational turns and advances infant language development

“…Recent studies call for language interventions targeting parental language quality and social aspects of parentchild language interaction (33,43). One intervention approach, adopted in the present study and in a limited number of previous studies (44)(45)(46)(47)(48), is to target specific aspects of parental language input to determine whether they are malleable, and if so, whether enhancements in these aspects lead to measurable changes in child language outcomes. We chose parentese as an entry point because it is used across cultures, and is present in most American households, but its frequency varies considerably (25)(26)(27)30).…”

The role of caregiver speech in supporting language development in infants and toddlers with autism spectrum disorder

“…Parents who entered the study with a fixed mindset, but then received growth mindset training, had children with the largest language gains. Children had smaller language gains if they had parents with a fixed mindset that did not receive intervention (Rowe & Leech, 2019). In other reports, parents in a reading intervention with embedded growth mindset training who reduced their “fixedness” belief had children with the largest gains in reading scores (Andersen & Nielsen, 2016), and mothers primed to use a growth mindset were more supportive of children during a difficult task (Moorman & Pomerantz, 2010).…”