Parenting Behaviour and Children's Cognitive Development

Sara Meadows

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317775188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

The association between parents' behaviour and children's cognitive development is at the meeting place of several prominent theories of psychological development and a range of complex methodological and conceptual issues. On the one hand there are theories which argue that the impetus of development is within the child and is largely unaffected by his or her experience of social interaction: on the other are the commonsense experience of parents and educators, and the body of neo-Vygotskian theory, which would see the child's development as profoundly affected by social interaction or even constituted by it. The purpose of this book is to examine theories and evidence carefully in order to assess the causal links between parent behaviour and children's cognitive development.
There is a considerable amount of evidence that suggests an association between parents' behaviour and their children's cognitive development; but there are many possible explanations for this association, including direct effects of parental teaching styles on the children's learning and motivation, differential social class practices and opportunities, genetic resemblances, and methodological artifacts. A close and critical look at a wide range of research and of theory is necessary if the causal questions are to be clarified.
This book develops the current arguments about the nature and causes of cognitive development, providing a critical discussion of the available research and relating it to psychological theory. It is suitable for advanced students of psychology and education.

Chapter One
Introduction

This book arises from my concerns as a psychologist working with teachers and parents who are concerned with improving the education which young children receive in their schools and in other social settings. My own commitment to this practical goal is accompanied by an older and perhaps more fundamental interest in how to understand cognitive development on the one hand and parenting on the other. In earlier publications (Meadows, 1983, 1986, 1993; Meadows & Cashdan, 1988), I reviewed the field of cognitive development in the years of childhood and found that although the questions surrounding the issue of how and to what extent children's interaction with other people affects their cognitive development were clearly important, they were not so clearly examined, let alone so clearly documented, as to provide us with a good understanding of what happens, why, and what a responsible society should seek to do about supporting and improving it. The purpose of this essay is first to consider the theoretical and metatheoretical issues in the field, and second to marshal and evaluate evidence which can contribute to a firmer understanding. I will do this by providing an account of the theoretical argument and empirical evidence for "social constructivism" in cognitive development, and testing this against two major counter-arguments. This critical approach does not indicate a lack of commitment to social constructivism; rather, it indicates a commitment to take it seriously, and thus to examine how it works and what its limits are.

The final section of my last book (Meadows, 1993) ended by making a number of points which I want to address analytically in this essay. It is necessary to begin with these, because in an area of such complexity as the association between parents' behaviour and children's cognitive development, it is important to spell out and test some very fundamental assumptions about, among other things, the nature of human nature, the nature of culture and the nature of the research effort. While some of these will seem to be truisms, the complexity of explaining cognitive development in the light of the important contributions made by adults is so great that it seems crucial to follow the good examples provided by Piaget and Vygotsky and try to set out one's paradigms first.

1. Children do their thinking in a world which presents a particular set of physical, social and conceptual problems in a particular range of settings and experiences. What makes for successful thinking depends to a large extent on the problem and its context, "Good" and "poor" performance are, to a considerable extent, situation-specific. Both the specificities and the general characteristics of "good" thinking need to be elucidated. There is a wide range of possible criteria for "good" thinking. Some are, in an obvious way, provided by culture; others appear more universal (for example, coherence, or flexibility, or compliance with the rules of logic), though on examination the "culture-free" nature of many of these is debatable. Further questions need to be asked about how these criteria are manifested in performance; perhaps one important characteristic of good cognitive development is an ability to use cognition both generally and differentially across tasks and contexts.

2. The point that there are different sorts of good and bad performance renders untenable the idea of "development" as unidimensional progress from less advanced to more advanced functioning, for example more "complex" cognition. Evolutionary theory makes the same point. In general, evolution has led to more complexity only if more complexity has led to a higher degree of reproductive success. Development may lead towards better success (though it by no means always does so), but what "success" is and how it is reached will depend on the environmental challenges an organism meets and on the resources it has to deal with them. Phylogenetically, it may be important to retain some flexibility or variation in the gene pool (or the cognitive repertory during ontogeny) to call on if the demands of the environment change.

3. As well as there being different sorts of good performance reached by different paths, different paths or different means may lead to the same end, more or less efficiently or effectively or happily. We need to beware of what I will call "cognitive chauvinism", the assumption that our own way of doing something is normal and best. We should also perhaps avoid assuming that the formally perfect model is always a good representation of what is actually done; "competence", or the heuristic that would lead to a perfect solution, and "performance", or the less formally perfect behaviour which is actually employed, may be cousins rather than identical twins.

4. Given this co-variation of context, performance and development, what may be important for cognitive development is the availability of a range of alternative strategies and the ability to select between them as appropriate to the particular situation. People whose repertoire of strategies is very limited or inflexible may do very well if they only encounter familiar problems, but much less well if a problem demands a new or modified strategy. This implies that cognitive processes have to become somewhat independent from the contexts in which they were first developed, to become at least potentially autonomous and consciously accessible tools. This probably requires conscious and deliberate application, and a willingness to exert effort and take risks; thus metacognition and motivation may be enormously important. Moving from being scaffolded by a more expert person to being able to support one's own cognition is an example of increasing autonomy in cognition. The process will never be complete, and cognition is always embedded in a context.

5. If cognition is initially part of a "context" and becomes somewhat independent of it but is never completely so, it will be necessary to examine the context, to identify the features which are preserved and which differ in new contexts, to examine the possibility or impossibility of transfer, to clarify, indeed, what in the person-process-context nexus is best attributed to what. As I will discuss, there are some theorists who see development as independent of context, and others who see it as constituted by it. Researchers also differ in how they seek to assess "context".

6. It is a common belief, which may be true, that one of the main candidates for a strong decisive influence on the content and effectiveness of cognitive development, and its speed, is the context of social interaction provided by the child's interaction with significant adults, especially parents. Certainly, human evolution has involved neoteny, a clinging to immature forms and a requirement for learning rather than instinct, which has made parental investment in offsprings' development essential for successful survival. It has been argued (e.g. Humphrey, 1976, 1983) that human language and cognition evolved to serve social purposes, to make possible the long-term interactions, relationships, cooperation and competition of the social group and to store and transmit its complex representations of information. As well as these fundamental skills, there is evidence that much of cognitive development in childhood involves the acquisition of culturally specific cognitive skills through social interactions such as apprenticeships, pupillage or observation. It may perhaps be possible to describe cognition without this social development, but it will have to be included in explanations, and in educational enterprises.

7. That part of cognition may be socially constituted opens up interesting possibilities. For example, socially based cognition may be more advanced than cognition which is more separate from the social world. Cognition which is done socially may be more effective than solitary cognition; inter-individual discussion, and intra-individual reflection with oneself as one's own partner, may be extremely valuable. Potential changes in society through changes in parenting and in education are another, reciprocal, set of possibilities.

8. The social world being emotional, there will also be intimate links between cognition and emotion in development. Self-concept and motivation, very much part of the consequences of social interaction, will affect and be affected by cognition. An exclusive focus on "cold" cognition and an assumption that people can turn on cognitive skills unaffected by their emotions, their motivations and their understanding of the social setting in which testing takes place, will be seriously misleading.

9. Furthermore, the possibility raised by sociologists (e.g. Mayall, 1994) has to be acknowledged: the social settings in which children's cognitive skills are developed may constrain and exploit them, as well as help to expand them. The skills and understandings, the behaviours and the representations of knowledge that adults encourage in children may be selected because they benefit adults rather than children; so may the ways in which they are offered. The organisation of schools, for example, with a teacher:child ratio of 1:30, requires the child to learn to be a self-educator in ways which would not be necessary if the teacher:pupil ratio was 1:1. Similarly, the information technology revolution has added new content to the curriculum, and the mastery of a new range of skills is required. This is a point with many ramifications, most of which will not receive further attention here.

10. Despite the importance of social facilitation of cognitive development, and of cultural tools for cognition and of cultural demands for cognition, the main "machine" with which we think is built and run as part of a genetically programmed body subject to the laws of biology. The training that a culture provides for its members works on a brain which expects environmental input of all sorts and integrates it with its own endogenous programmes. The brain is dependent on experience for its development, both the experience which all brains could "expect" to receive for the fine-tuning of pre-programmed development, and less expected experience for the building-up of more idiosyncratic neural networks which differ more between individuals. The question of how inside and outside forces interact is complex, controversial, intractable and endlessly fascinating. I will sketch two accounts of this interaction in this essay, though I do not think they as yet answer the question.

These are not new points, but they are not perhaps as clearly considered in mainstream developmental psychology as they might be. Sometimes this is because in order to construct a researchable question (even more problematic to construct a fundable one), epistemological complexities have to be put to one side in favour of using a simpler paradigm. Sometimes, however, these simplifications introduce a bias which distorts understanding and can come to impoverish the field. I think that this has happened in the case of cognitive development; Piagetian theory, a child-centred approach with immense merits but the major demerit of marginalising other people's contributions to an individual's development, has flourished and been criticised, and other competing approaches have followed, with different strengths and weaknesses. In this confusion between paradigms, there is a danger that assumptions will be implicit rather than questioned, that paradigms will be adopted or rejected rather than carefully tested, and that data drawn from one approach will not be drawn on appropriately for other approaches. I believe that this has happened in the study of cognitive development, and that the issue of how adult—child interaction contributes to the development of cognition is one where a critical analysis and synthesis of paradigms is timely.

In order to address these issues, which are very much at the meeting point of several prominent theories of development and a range of difficult conceptual and methodological issues, I will provide an evaluation of certain crucial epistemological assumptions as embodied in the Piagetian, Vygotskian and information-processing paradigms; review psychological research documenting the patterns of association between adults' behaviour and children's cognitive development; and draw them together in an attempt to understand what would be required for an adequate account of cognitive development as a biological and cultural phenomenon. The next chapter reviews models of cognitive development which focus on what is going on inside children's minds as they develop new cognitive structures. It is followed by an account of neo-Vygotskian "social constructivist" theory, which focuses more on adult—child interaction as a major source of cognitive development. There is then a review of some of the relevant data on parent-child interaction, especially interaction which could be described as neo-Vygotskian "scaffolding". This is followed by an examination of recent work which emphasises the genetic roots of parents' impact on children; this reinforces the importance of precision in specifying how parents have an effect on children, and suggests alternative causal chains may also be influential. Chapter 6 uses data from parent-child interactions which do not fit the "mainstream" pattern of scaffolding to test whether its benefits are as clear as the neo-Vygotskian theorists suggest. The final chapter provides a recapitulation of important points, and an overview of how parent-child interaction is implicated in cognitive development.

Chapter Two
Theoretical perspectives: Cognitive development as primarily endogenous

Introduction

It must be the most fundamental question regarding the psychology of cognitive development: What models are appropriate for cognition? Are we best thought of as "in essence limited capacity manipulators of symbols" (Siegler, 1983, p. 129), so that simulation by computer is a central research strategy, perhaps even more important than looking at real humans; or as biological organisms with a long evolutionary history which has led us to have a brain which functions in particular ways and leads to particular cognitive activities, just as we have evolved lungs to breathe in a particular way, livers with a particular range of digestive powers, and a thumb articulated with fingers so that fine grasping is possible; or as members of social groups taking part in relationships and in cultures, and using and developing our cognition within them and inseparable from them?

Different models of human nature make different decisions about the relative importance of these models, whether to prioritise the social, the biological or the formal, whether to think of cognition as computation or adaptation or acculturation. Each model has enabled us to inch towards improved understanding of cognition, but each has its costs as well as its benefits.

The big divide, I think, is between those models where development is largely asocial and predominantly endogenous, and those where it is socially constituted or exogenous. There is a basic philosophical divide here which places Hegel on one side and Kant on the other (see, e.g. Markova, 1982); or, in contemporary work, at one extreme we have nativist theories postulating innate ideas (e.g. Fischer & Bidell, 1991; Fodor, 1981, 1983; and see also Plomin, 1994b; Plomin & McClearn, 1993) and at the other we are essentially constituted by our society (e.g. Bronfennbrenner & Ceci, 1993; Mayall, 1994). Most developmental psychologists agree that "cognitive development" involves change from a starting point which includes some innate predispositions, if not ideas, towards later states which vary in their content and in their sources, and that this change comes about largely through an active engagement of the individual with the physical and social worlds; however, emphases within this general agreement differ considerably. The debate in the psychology of cognitive development is embodied in the work of Piaget and Vygotsky. Each acknowledged that cognitive development is both endogenous and influenced by the outside social world, and each admired the other's work even when there were disagreements, but they developed different emphases, particularly regarding the role of adult-child interaction in the development of the child's cognition (Glassman. 1994; Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). I will outline their theories in turn. Piagetian theory has been understood as marginalising the role of adults in children's cognitive development, and so might be judged to be irrelevant to this essay, but an understanding of this child-centred approach is essential for an appreciation of the strengths and the problems of theory which takes the alternative approach and centres on adults' contributions to children's cognition.

Piagetian Theory and Adult-Child Interaction in the Development of the Child’s Cognition

Piaget emphasised the biological nature of cognition, seeing it as one form of the general struggle for "adaptation" to the environment which is characteristic of all living organisms and at the heart of evolution, with the motive forces for this struggle being seen as predominantly endogenous. The Piagetian organism owes its development primarily to an innate and inevitable drive to adapt to its environment, through assimilating new information to the structures of knowledge which have already developed, and accommodating its existing structures of knowledge to accumulating new information. It is equipped with a need to "equilibrate"; that is, to maximise consistency, to eliminate contradiction and to ensure coherence in what it knows. It develops through equilibration's orchestration of three disparate things: physical maturation, primarily of the brain; reflection on its experience of the physical world and of the logical rules which can be applied to it; and finally and marginally, social interaction. The last factor is the least emphasised in Piagetian theory. The main form of social interaction which he saw as contributing to cognitive development was conflict with one's peers. This could lead to a recognition that one's own ideas were disagreed with by someone like oneself, and therefore might potentially be disagreed with by oneself too. (Equilibration is also, and more importantly perhaps, driven by the recognition that one actually disagrees with oneself, in an entirely endogenous cognitive conflict.) This recognition of a potential internal conflict is what prompts further reflection, and the revision of old ideas. Piaget (1932, 1968, 1983) implied that disagreement with someone unlike oneself would not have this effect of sparking off an internal disagreement, because it would not be recognised as potentially one's own problem. Disagreement with an adult, especially correction by an adult, would have little benefit for true cognitive development both because adults are viewed as different by children and because the power difference complicates things; the Piagetian child may bow to the adult's authority to the extent of parroting the correction, but will not internalise it. The result of adult instruction in the Piagetian model is limited; it gives rise to passive copying of what the adult has said is right, which does not become integrated with what the child has worked out independently, and may be even more damaging in that it may prevent the child from discovering for him or herself what the adult has taught.

In some cases, what is transmitted by instruction is well assimilated by the child because it represents in fact an extension of some spontaneous constructions of his own. In such cases his development is accelerated. But in other cases, the gifts of instruction are presented too soon or too late, or in a manner that precludes assimilation because it does not fit with the child's spontaneous constructions. Then the child's development is impeded, or even deflected into barrenness, as so often happens in the teaching of the exact sciences (Piaget, 1962, p. 246).

(This particular example is interesting because Vygotsky, as we will see, made a case for the reverse in the development of scientific concepts, arguing that formal instruction enriched the child's independently developed informal scientific concepts and that science could and should be taught. Bryant (1995) makes a similar point about young children's arithmetic.)

The main thrust of Piaget's argument was, then, that children can only profit from social interaction if they already have the relevant cognitive structures, that social interaction can only complete their development, not create it. Conflict is more important than confirmation, and relationships which are unequal in competence and status cannot result in an improvement in cognitive development because the junior partner, the child, will not be able to be an active partner in resolving disagreement. Young children will be especially unable to profit from social interaction because they are too "egocentric" to recognise that there is a disagreement, and so will not notice that there is a cognitive conflict. Premature teaching is likely to distort and impede development. All in all, this is a picture of cognitive development that marginalises adult-child interaction; adults are at best marginally able to facilitate by providing materials for the child to explore, but may be dangerous intruders and distorters of development if they try to teach.

Piaget also insisted on cognitive development being uniform across individuals in the sense that they would all develop their cognitive structures in the same sequence despite differences in social milieu; such differences could lead to individual differences in rate of progress through the stages, and to minor differences in the detail of the content to which structures are applied, but not to major differences in the sequence or the overall structure of stages. Such developmental processes as accommodation and assimilation were "functional invariants", uniform across all cognitive de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theoretical perspectives: Cognitive development as primarily endogenous
• 3. Theoretical perspectives: Cognitive development as largely exogenous
• 4. Parent-child interaction as a source of cognitive development: Empirical studies
• 5. Is the apparent effect of scaffolding an epiphenomenon?
• 6. Parents and children with scaffolding problems
• 7. Concluding remarks
• References
• Additional reading
• Author index
• Subject index