Joint roles of parenting and nutritional status for child development: Evidence from rural Cambodia

Abstract

Substantial work has demonstrated that early nutrition and home environments, including the degree to which children receive cognitive stimulation and emotional support from parents, play a profound role in influencing early childhood development. Yet, less work has documented the joint influences of parenting and nutritional status on child development among children in the preschool years living in low‐income countries. Using panel data from 2016 to 2017 on the parenting, nutritional status, and early developmental outcomes (executive function, language, early numeracy, and socioemotional problems) of 6,508 Cambodian children ages 3–5 years, our findings demonstrate that inequities in early development associated with family wealth are evident at age 3 and increase among children ages 4 and 5 years. Using hierarchical regression analysis, a significant share of these inequalities is explained by differences in parenting and early nutritional status, measured by stunting. Better‐educated parents engage in more stimulating and supportive parenting practices. However, the positive association between parenting and language and early numeracy outcomes is 35–54% stronger for non‐stunted children, and parental activities explain only about 8–14% of the cognitive gap between the lowest and highest wealth quintiles. The results highlight the need for additional research outlining interactions between environmental factors that link family wealth and child development.

Studying Executive Function Skills in Young Children in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries: Progress and Directions

“…Although most research on EFs has been conducted in high‐income countries, growing evidence points to analogous findings in low‐ and middle‐income countries, including links between young children’s EFs and cognitive, language, academic, and socioemotional skills (Lohndorf, Vermeer, Cárcamo, De la Harpe, & Mesman, ; Obradović, Yousafzai, Finch, & Rasheed, ; Willoughby, Piper, Oyanga, & Merseth King, ; Wolf & McCoy, ), and neural maturity (Boivin & Giordani, ; Tarullo et al, ), as well as parental behaviors and family experiences (Berkes, Raikes, Bouguen, & Filmer, ; Fernald, Weber, Galasso, & Ratsifandrihamanana, ; McCoy, Zuilkowski, & Fink, ; Obradović et al, ). That we now see commonalities in criterion validity, biological basis, and family predictors around the world indicates that EFs may be culturally universal skills.…”

Reorienting Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kenya: A Review

“…Therefore, to promote safety and security, families and children need to live in safe environments, where children experience supportive discipline and do not experience neglect or violence. Responsive caregiving ensures sensitivity to children’s cues, thus promoting play and stimulation for early learning through day-to-day activities as well as caregiver–child interactions that are enjoyable [ 76 , 77 ].…”

Improving Preschool Provision and Encouraging Demand: Heterogeneous Impacts of a Large-Scale Program

“…This section summarizes the individual tests, their distributions and the scoring methods used in this paper. An in-depth discussion of the tests, scoring methods, cultural adaptations and pretesting procedures can be found in Berkes et al (2019a). To ensure that children correctly understood the tests and that the test were reliable, the research team pretested every instrument at least three times before collecting data in the sample villages.…”