4.5: Social Contexts and Influences in Infants and Toddlers
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Identify the major contexts for social and emotional development in infancy and toddlerhood
- Describe cultural and familial variations in the major contexts for social and emotional development
Gerald is a retired grandfather and the legal guardian of eighteen-month-old twins Kara and Tamara. When he takes them to their toddler playgroup, he is the only grandpa there. Although the younger parents try to make him feel welcome, he feels his family is different. As a single man, he sometimes finds being the twins’ caregiver exhausting, and he hopes to find camaraderie and support in the playgroup.
Recently, the other parents have started discussing childcare options, and it seems many of the twins’ playmates will be heading to day care or getting home care. Gerald is unfamiliar with the world of formal childcare, since family members helped care for his own children when they were young. On his limited income, he cannot afford extra help, and he does not plan to enroll the twins in day care.
Each week at playgroup, Gerald notices other differences between his family and others. His own children grew up in an era of padded cribs and infant walkers, and new trends such as infant carriers and co-sleeping are odd to him. He is interested in the discussions of screen time and how this affects toddlers’ emotional awareness, especially because his children grew up with fewer devices. Gerald is thinking a lot about contextual factors like care arrangements and exposure to media that influence infant and toddler development.
Family and Community as Context
The word “family” might bring to mind a specific type of family, perhaps one that mirrors your own family of origin, your chosen family, or the type of family you have or want to have one day. However, families can be very wide ranging and diverse, and both new and growing families also face new challenges when an infant enters the picture. In this section, you’ll explore family structures, home environments, and the variety of contexts in which families interact.
Family Structure
A family is a group of at least two people who work together as a unit, share financial resources, and are related either by blood or by legal contract such as for adoption or marriage. Families come in many constellations and can include groups or pairs of related adults without children. Families with children can include parents who are single, married, a common-law or long-term couple, separated, divorced, or widowed. Family members can also include stepparents, adoptive parents, and foster parents, along with other caregivers such as grandparents, uncles, aunts, older cousins, and siblings.
One family type is the nuclear family , in which children live with two parental figures. A single-parent family consists of a child or children and only one parental figure. Another common type is the blended family , in which at least one parent has remarried, and stepparents and stepsiblings may be present (Ginther & Pollak, 2004). Sometimes children in blended families live part of the time in a second household with another parent, and this splitting of time between households yields a commuter family . Finally, an intergenerational family is a household that includes parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents, all working together as one financial unit (Li & Huang, 2017).
Families can contain parents of any gender, sex, and sexual orientation. Gay, lesbian, and queer families can be nuclear, blended, intergenerational, or any other type. Families may be single parent or dual parent, with one or multiple caregivers serving as the primary caregiver. Research indicates that high-quality parent-child relationships and overall well-being are present in a variety of family constellations (Farr et al., 2020; Tornello & Patterson, 2018). In the United States, around 2.6 million LGBTQ+ adults are parents (Wilson & Bouton, 2024). 4 LGBTQ+ parents may also face unique stressors, particularly with discriminatory treatment or barriers to becoming parents, such as adoption policies and cultural attitudes (Patterson, 2024).
LGBTQ+ parents and heterosexual parents experience similar levels of parenting satisfaction, parenting quality, and child development outcomes (Patterson, 2022). 5 Heterosexual couples may also face unique stressors including uneven and inequitable workloads and childcare responsibilities, particularly in dual-earner homes. Though paternal involvement has increased over the last several decades, research indicates there is a lack of balance in home and childcare labor, with mothers often doing a larger share of both roles (DeGroot & Vik, 2020; Sayer, 2016). Working mothers in particular face risks related to role strain, feeling the stress of competing and overwhelming life demands, which can decrease self-care and emotional well-being over time (Dugan & Barnes-Farrell, 2020). This inequality may have increased during the era known as “pandemic parenting” (Calarco et al., 2021). However, when fathers and mothers balance the caregiving and household roles in two-parent heterosexual families, it predicts greater emotional well-being in children and in parents as well as improved parent-child relationship quality (Chung, 2021).
Some families may face unique risks, for example, when adopted children have experienced early adversity or lived in an institutionalized setting. Research shows that when adoptive parents provide warm, sensitive parenting, adoptive children are better able to improve in their attachment and have a lower risk in long-term behavior problems (Yarger et al., 2020; Paine et al., 2021; Yarger et al., 2019). Foster parents and facilities can use these same strategies to improve child developmental outcomes (Chodura et al., 2021; Wade et al., 2024). Children can thrive and experience healthy development in any of these (Figure 4.16). Overall, they benefit more from stability and consistent caregiving and support than from a particular type of family structure. Healthy family dynamics and caregiving begin with attachment, synchrony, and building trust in infancy and then grow into more defined parenting styles in early childhood.
The component of family structure that most strongly influences infants’ and toddlers’ social and emotional development is the number of caregiver s. Families with two caregivers, such as a mom and a dad, two moms, an uncle and a grandmother, or any other combination of two adults, tend to experience less stress than single-parent households (Biblarz & Gottainer, 2000).
Two types of stress that single parents experience are financial strain and time strain . Financial strain occurs when it becomes a challenge to afford shelter, food, education, and entertainment for children. Although any family can experience this stress, households with two adults typically have the potential to earn two incomes and enjoy more financial resources than one parental figure trying to balance childcare and work outside the home. Time strain occurs when a single parent lacks the hours to provide adequate attention, comfort, instruction, and love to their children. In a two-parent household, parents might be able to take turns devoting themselves to family time, whereas single parents are more likely to feel overworked (Van Gasse & Mortelmans, 2020). Time strain can occur in any type of family as well, and employed parents, whether single parents or dual earners, are more likely to experience it (Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2020).
Communities
Families exist within larger communities. Single-parent households in communal and family-focused neighborhoods may be able to rely on other households for support. Single-parent networks, or groups of single parents who rely on each other for babysitting, childcare, and errand running, can help to reduce each other’s financial and time strain. Single-parent and nuclear families who live close to extended family members may also rely on these family members to provide childcare and other types of support.
Developmental psychologists view the impact of families and wider communities on infant social development through Uri Bronfenbrenner ’s ecological systems model, introduced in 1.4 Contexts and Settings of Development (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). According to this model, children are nested within a microsystem , which consists of the people with whom they have direct, regular relationships, often their immediate and close family. Infants’ interactions with parents, family members, and close neighbors make up their microsystem. Parents’ interactions with each other and the relationships among other family members whom infants see regularly make up the next level, the mesosystem . For example, parents who communicate well and have a good relationship with each other are providing a positive mesosystem influence. The mesosystem can also include interactions between educators and parents, between caregivers and their employers, or between any broader systems.
Moving beyond people children interact with regularly, the ecological model’s next level is the exosystem, the social and physical settings or contexts that affect the developing individual indirectly, such as community norms, neighborhood trends, and the family’s extended environment. For example, neighbors might be either friendly and supportive toward one another or merely strangers. Extended environments include the parent’s workplace, the media, and broader influences like school boards and politics. Other components of the exosystem are neighborhood and community safety, activities, and resources.
Next is the macrosystem , which consists of broad influences of culture such as geography, religion, nationality, and language. Features of the macrosystem might include a democratic form of government or a culture that provides free health care for all.
Finally, the chronosystem describes changes over time and major historical events that will influence infants’ development, like being young during a global pandemic when many families worked from home, or growing up in times of war or natural disaster. The arrival of new technologies, such as radio, television, and the internet, is also an aspect of the chronosystem.
The layers of environmental factors in the ecological model can stack and influence one another. For instance, an economic downturn in the chronosystem can lower employment rates in the macrosystem, which in turn can reduce community vibrancy in the exosystem. These events may also put financial strain on caregivers, which can contribute to marital conflict in the mesosystem and hurt the quality of parent-infant interactions in the microsystem.
As the ecological model suggests, many community and contextual factors can bear on the quality of an infant’s home environment. Community and cultural influences can place additional strain on families but also provide additional support and resources. Providing stability and support for the infant as they develop at each of these levels can lay the foundations for healthy development and well-being across the lifespan.
Link to Learning
Watch this video that describes Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model and the ways it influenced policies and resources like Head Start to learn more.
Quality of Home Environments
Many factors in the home environment contribute to an infant’s well-being . The quality of caregivers’ interactions with infants is an influential predictor of long-term healthy developmental outcomes.
A major factor that can influence the quality of family interactions, in addition to the financial and time constraints mentioned earlier, is parental well-being. Parents struggling with medical problems like cancer, mental health concerns such as depression, or substance use and addiction may not have the ability to focus on their infants as much as they would like. Finally, parents who face domestic violence, unsafe housing, or political unrest often cannot prioritize spending meaningful time with infants and toddlers and instead must focus on physical safety (Berge et al., 2020; Liel et al., 2020; Mattelin et al., 2024). However, as many responses to the COVID-19 pandemic showed, families with close relationships and strong protective factors can reduce these risks and promote resilience in children (Prime et al., 2020).
The quality of the home environment can be assessed in many ways, but one useful scale is the Home Observation for the Measure of the Environment (HOME) scale (Bradley & Caldwell, 1976; Totsika & Sylva, 2004). In this scale, quality of home environment is rated on three components, parental responsiveness, home cleanliness, and child cleanliness:
- Parental responsiveness assesses caregivers’ attention, communication, and emotional support of their infants.
- Home cleanliness notes whether the child’s play area is free of hazards, well lit, orderly, and includes toys.
- Child cleanliness looks at whether the child has access to medical care, eats at least once per day, and has clean clothes and hair.
The HOME scale was created in the United States but has been successfully adapted for other countries such as Bangladesh, Peru, and Tanzania (Jones et al., 2017). Across various countries, this adaptation was effective in measuring home environments and demonstrated that better home conditions are related to improved developmental outcomes (Jones et al., 2017). While this doesn’t mean we have to have a perfectly clean home every day, it does indicate that the presence of basic care, a safe environment, and parents who are responsive can promote child well-being across many cultures and contexts.
Childcare Context
In the United States, one parent in many two-parent households in the past stayed home to care for the couple’s infants and toddlers. Starting in the 1980s, a growing percentage of two-parent households became dual-income households, in which both caregivers worked outside the home and young infants were brought to childcare settings. There are various childcare settings from which families can choose and childcare quality can vary in several ways.
Childcare Settings
In family care , children are cared for by an extended family member in either the child’s home or the caregiver’s home. Infants and toddlers may spend the day with other children such as cousins, or they may receive one-on-one attention. In nanny services , an adult provides care in the child’s home, either one-on-one or with their siblings. In both family care and nanny services, children are likely to have the stability of a familiar caregiver who provides for them in a familiar environment.
Childcare may also take place in another family’s home. One example is home day care . Here, another family welcomes children into their home and provides care for them during daytime working hours. Home day-care centers are often regulated: providers have training and certification in early childhood education and are registered with the state or province. But providers can also be unregulated and may or may not have certification or training (Dowsett et al., 2008). In home day care, infants and toddlers interact with a few other children in a homelike environment.
Finally, childcare may also include center care , or day care centers, in which commercial properties such as childcare centers, early learning centers, and preschools offer care during daytime working hours (Figure 4.17). Infants and toddlers are often divided into classroom groups with similar-aged peers and receive care from a variety of staff members. Center care may be more highly regulated, though that can vary across center type, regions, and country guidelines. The center often must register with the state or province and be regularly inspected by government officials (Dowsett et al., 2008). While staff at these centers may be more likely to have a certification in early childhood education, many childcare centers struggle with having appropriate training for staff, retention of staff, and quality of programming (Eadie et al., 2024; Hur et al., 2023; Eadie et al., 2022).
It Depends: What Type of Childcare Is Best?
With so many options for childcare, parents face a lot of choices when deciding what is best for their family. Family care may be more financially viable for many parents, and it is appealing for its potential to strengthen family bonds and preserve cultural values (Ferguson et al., 2020). Having one caregiver at home or having an extended relative provide care can give children a sense of security and facilitate their identity development within their family. But family care is not always possible, since both parents may need to work, and extended relatives may live far away or lack the skills, beliefs, or attitudes that match what parents desire. And for some single children, family care may reduce their opportunities to interact with many other children, which can be helpful to social development. However, many families may form parenting groups to provide playdates for their children.
Children who are more nervous or quiet, or who have developmental disabilities, may benefit from receiving care provided by another family in a home setting. Typically, in home care, a small number of children (six or fewer) play together in a provider’s home. This arrangement can allow children to form close bonds with others without being overwhelmed by the stimulation of a larger commercialized center. It can also help them develop more confidence about leaving home and is a good stepping stone to the start of formal education. For example, some research shows that children with more a more difficult temperament benefit from early childcare education through improved social behaviors and peer interactions (Lindberg et al., 2019).
Finally, center care is beneficial for families who need reliable care. Whereas family care and home care might not be available during evenings or on holidays, commercialized childcare centers often have longer opening hours and extra staff on call for illness or emergencies. Being registered and regulated by government agencies, center care is typically held to high standards and provides enrichment in cognitive, emotional, and physical stimulation. Centers often must pass rigorous safety checks as well. However, large centers can have outbreaks of disease, from stomach bugs to coughs, colds, and even lice. For some children with health considerations or weakened immunity, this care setting may not be the best option. Various settings may also carry risks of abuse, so paying careful attention to the quality and safety of whatever childcare option you choose is essential (Talmon et al., 2024). Specific risk factors of abuse in a day care setting include poor training of staff, lower quality facilities, and a high child/staff ratio. Prevention strategies to reduce risk of day-care maltreatment include better training for staff, particularly on emotion regulation and educating parents and health-care providers to screen for childcare abuse (Talmon et al., 2024).
Childcare Quality
All forms of childcare can vary in quality. Although center care is the most highly regulated, factors such as high turnover of staff members, crowded classrooms, and unkept play spaces and materials can lower the quality of care. Higher childcare quality is associated with better outcomes for children and improved parent-child relationships (Fischer et al., 2021). Regardless of childcare type, high-quality care typically has several common features:
- clean, spacious play areas with engaging toys and books
- good nutrition in the form of meals or snacks
- attentive caregivers with knowledge and experience with children
- small staff-to-infant ratios (one worker to three infants under eighteen months of age)
- low turnover among workers
- minimal screen time on TVs, tablets, and phones
- time for active play outdoors in a safe environment
- quiet spaces or times for infants and toddlers to rest
As more U.S. families began to send infants and toddlers to childcare in the increase of dual-earner homes, some people worried that such care would harm infants’ social and emotional well-being, including their attachment, emotion regulation, and family relationships. In 1991, researchers associated with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) began collecting data about newborns in ten locations around the United States. The infants were followed for fifteen years as part of the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) database. Results indicated overwhelmingly that children who attended childcare from an early age and those who did not had similar overall developmental outcomes, if the childcare provided was of high quality and children attended for less than nine hours per day (Vandell et al., 2010; Vandell & Gülseven, 2023).
In many cases, high-quality childcare can improve developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers from low-income households. The Head Start program, begun in 1965, is designed to help children from such households prepare for the start of formal education. Early Head Start targets infants and toddlers and provides enrichment through stimulating childcare environments that foster cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development, as well as a nutritional program. Enrollment in Early Head Start is associated with positive developmental outcomes in areas including school attendance, reading ability, development of emotion regulation skills, and physical health (Choi et al., 2019; Heberle & Chazan-Cohen, 2023). Early Head Start also decreases caregiver stress and is associated with lower rates of infant maltreatment (Green et al., 2020).
Intersections and Contexts: Social Development and Family Income
Raising infants and toddlers is expensive. Costs may include formula, human milk pumping supplies, food, clothing, diapers, medical care, strollers and carriers, and a variety of safety gear ranging from car seats to baby gates. Families who are unemployed, underemployed, or underpaid often struggle with the costs of caring for newborns, especially alongside other rising costs like those for housing, utilities, and transportation.
Living with high financial strain can impact infant development, because it typically means parents are facing pressure to provide for their family and need to spend longer hours at work. Sometimes families cannot afford high-quality childcare, and infants and toddlers are left with inexperienced care providers who are unable to provide an enriched environment. Children may lack access to stimulating toys and books that would help foster their development. With the rising cost of groceries, providing healthy nutrition can also be a challenge, especially if toddlers are picky eaters.
In the United States, 17 percent of Black Americans and 17 percent of Hispanic Americans live in poverty, compared to 8 percent of White Americans and 8 percent of Asian Americans (Shrider & Creamer, 2023). In addition to poverty, Black and Hispanic families face other barriers such as employment discrimination, police harassment, and intergenerational trauma resulting from systemic racism, which can all affect the way families provide for infants and toddlers. A family worried about encountering racism from the community and/or local officials may be too anxious and stressed to attend to their children’s emotional needs, preferring instead to prioritize their physical safety.
So, what can be done? Taxpayer and government support for community programs like school nutrition programs, community health centers, free children’s bicycle programs, and public libraries can help provide low-income families with access to valuable resources. Being aware of systemic barriers that maintain inequities across ethnic, racial, and cultural groups is also important. For instance, school curricula that teach only about European American history, or school or workplace policies that discriminate against traditional hairstyles of Black people, may need to be updated to be inclusive of all individuals in the community. Together, these types of broad support can help improve the lives of families with infants and toddlers. Providing high-quality and inclusive education and health resources in early childhood can decrease health and other inequities across the lifespan (Halfon et al., 2020).
Socialization and Cultural Practices
Infants and toddlers are active in their environments, influencing others with smiles and cries, building attachment and relationships with caregivers, and forming the core components of their identity. Around the world, infants are learning to achieve these developmental milestones in many different contexts and cultures.
Although sleeping in bassinets or cribs is still common in Canada, co-sleeping with infants is popular in South Africa (Zaidman-Mograbi et al., 2020). More than 13 percent of infants and toddlers in Namibia experience fosterage, living away from their parents and with grandmothers, their fathers’ second wives, or unrelated families (Edwards et al., 2015).
These cultural differences in childrearing practices can influence the social and emotional development of infants and toddlers. Families that provide close physical and emotional care (proximal care) may reinforce emotion regulation, whereas families that provide more hands-off (distal) and verbal emotional care by singing nursery rhymes encourage psychological control (Keller et al., 2004). Across a variety of parenting styles and cultures, there are small differences in self-regulation and self-recognition (Keller et al., 2004). For example, some cultures may focus on children’s autonomy by encouraging early independence and toilet training, whereas others may stress the value of the family and teach toddlers the ways in which family members are connected to one another (Keller, 2018). Finally, infants with a larger number of caregivers may learn a variety of skills, adapting to multiple social situations and developing improved vocabularies (Okocha et al., 2024). Regardless of the culture, family size, or family structure, infants and toddlers benefit when parents are more knowledgeable about raising children and are consistently supportive and responsive to them (Jeong et al., 2021; Leung & Suskind, 2020).
In recent decades, infant’s and toddler’s access to mobile devices has increased significantly, representing a cultural shift in a child’s socioemotional environment (Radesky et al., 2020) (Figure 4.18). Cell phones and tablets can connect people but may also alter our (and our children’s) responsiveness to those in our immediate environment (Roche et al., 2022). Screens and technology can provide benefits like video calling with extended family members, access to educational games, and opportunities to practice finger dexterity. However, there are developmental drawbacks to early exposure (Kracht et al., 2023).
Infants who spend more than fifteen hours per week watching screens are more likely to have delayed vocabulary growth and display attentional problems by the age of six years (Duch et al., 2013; Sundqvist et al., 2024). Caregivers who indulge in too much screen time are also at risk; parents who ignored infants’ emotional cues to attend to a mobile device were more likely to report that their children had behavioral problems (McDaniel & Radesky, 2018). Finally, infants benefit from face-to-face interactions and learn more effectively from in-person interactions than from on-screen interactions. Interventions and education for parents about the benefits of parent-child play and reduced screen time can be effective in promoting healthy infant and toddler development (Adams et al., 2018).
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