Environmental risk, biological risk, and developmental outcome.

Abstract

The impact of 2 environmental and 2 biological risk measures was studied in 175 preterm children. Levels of family risk, which included family composition, support, and interaction variables, and social class, as well as increases or decreases in family risk over the 1st year of life, were examined with intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) and other neonatal medical complications as predictors of cognitive and motor outcomes in the 2nd year of life. Family risk, early medical risk, and the Family Risk X IVH interaction emerged as significant predictors of later development. Family risk had less impact on subjects at highest medical risk. Different regression equations for each outcome underscored the specificity of environmental effects on developmental outcomes.The environmental context in which a child is raised has long been recognized as crucial to determining developmental outcome in any number of domains. Wachs (1991) has enumerated three historical stages of research on the impact of the environment on development. In the earliest stage, studies determined that variability in the environment was related to variability in development. The environment was characterized by global, social address variables, such as socioeconomic status (SES), which do not affect the child directly. In the second stage, studies characterized by an exploration of the relation between more specific environmental variables, such as parental responsivity and variety of stimulation, and developmental outcome were examined (Lewis & Goldberg, 1969). In the third stage, the most recent research addressed the importance of organismenvironment interactions in understanding the complex relation between environmental, individual characteristics and development.Early studies found SES to be strongly related to developmental outcomes in normal and high-risk samples (

Motor Development of Cocaine-exposed Children at Age Two Years

“…The only effect of gender detected was on the receipt and propulsion subscale. This reinforces previous studies 35 and current theory 36 that motor development is a product of the interaction of genetic attributes, biologic maturation, and environmental stimulation. Maternal age >30 has been linked to poorer motor development in children whose mothers used alcohol during pregnancy.…”

“…The most important caveat is that the findings do not establish a causal relationship between prenatal cocaine exposure and later developmental delays. Although motor development, compared with language or social skills, appears to have a greater neurobiologic basis and may be relatively less affected by cultural factors [39][40][41][42] , the environment in which the children are raised will influence the rate and level of motor development. This point is most evident in the relatively low correlations between birth and maternal variables and motor outcomes.…”

Arousal modulation in cocaine-exposed infants.

“…Such aggregate variables are more stable than any individual measure, and there is increased power to detect effects of the environment because errors of measurement decrease as scores are summed (Wachs, 1991). Similar cumulative environmental risk measures have been found to account for more variance in child outcome variables than single factors, including socioeconomic status (Bendersky & Lewis, 1994;McGauhey, Starfield, Alexander, & Ensminger, 1991;Sameroff, Seifer, Baldwin, & Baldwin, 1993;Sameroff, Seifer, Barocas, Zax, & Greenspan, 1987;Stanton, McGee, & Silva, 1991).…”

Estudo comparativo das características do ambiente familiar de crianças com alto e baixo rendimento acadêmico

“…Outras variáveis, tais como responsividade dos pais, aceitação da criança, organização da casa, disponibilidade de brinquedos e variedade de materiais e, envolvimento e participação dos pais com a criança, mostram correlações significativas com desempenho acadêmico e resultados cognitivos e motores infantis (Bradley, Caldwell & Rock, 1988;Bendersky & Lewis, 1994). A participação e o envolvimento dos pais na escola também têm se mostrado uma variá-vel importante relacionada ao desempenho escolar infantil (Reynolds & Bezruczko, 1993;Santos, 2002).…”