Predictors of Parenting: Family-Wide and Child-Specific Factors

Objective. The goal of the study was to identify determinants of child perceptions of parenting. Design. By using two children per family, the current study predicted siblings’ (106 pairs) perceptions of mothering and fathering at ages 9–13 from children’s perceptions of parenting and parent ratings of child difficulty, parental emotionality, and household organization, when the children were 4–8 years old. Multi-level modeling was used to differentiate between- and within-family variation. Results. Stability in child perceptions was moderate, and this stability was due to family-wide parenting shared by siblings. Conversely, the majority of variance in the 9- to 13-year-olds’ perceptions indicated differential, rather than similar, parental treatment. Maternal anger predicted maternal hostility. In contrast, household chaos predicted paternal hostility. Conclusions. Relationships between individuals in the family are part of a larger system, and children are equally as likely as parents to reap the benefits of services or interventions directed toward enhancing maternal well-being.     

Syntactic movement in orally trained children with hearing impairment

This study explored the comprehension and production of sentences derived by syntactic movement, in orally trained school-age Hebrew-speaking children with moderate to profound hearing impairment, aged 7;8-9;9 years. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of relative clauses and topicalization sentences (with word orders of OVS [object, verb, subject] and OSV [object, subject, verb]) using a sentence-picture matching task. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the production of relative clauses using two elicitation tasks. Experiment 5 tested the comprehension of relative clauses with and without resumptive pronouns. As a group, the children with hearing loss failed to understand object relatives and OVS topicalization sentences. In the production tasks they either avoided producing a sentence with syntactic movement, by using a relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun instead of a gap or by producing a sentence without a relative clause, or produced ungrammatical sentences. They understood correctly object relatives with resumptive pronouns, which are not derived by movement. Both comprehension and production of the hearing-impaired group was significantly different from that of the hearing control group. Individual performance was strongly correlated with the age of intervention: only children who received hearing aids before the age of 8 months performed well in the comprehension tasks. Type of hearing aid, duration of use of a cochlear implant, and degree of hearing loss did not correlate with syntactic comprehension.     

Still waters run deep

This study aims to compare girls' performance with that of their boy peers, in a special program called a “research class.” Eighteen eleventh-grade students who excelled in math and science volunteered for a special research class in biology. The program consisted of three supplemental hours of biology per week at school, plus one full day per week at a research institute. At the institute the students were required to conduct individual research projects under the guidance of a scientist as well as the supervision of their biology teacher. The data about the participating students was collected through qualitative methods. Nonparticipant observations were conducted, primarily in the classroom and less frequently at the research institute, over a long period of time. These observations yielded information regarding each gender's quality of work. Following these observations, all of the participating adults and students were interviewed, and questionnaires were completed by the students. The main findings of the study indicated that the boys were significantly more active in classroom discussions than were the girls. This observation was reconfirmed by an analysis of verbal interventions in classroom discussions. However, in both the teacher's evaluation and the students' self-evaluation of their achievements, the girls' ratings were at least as high as the boys, with an average of 9 on a scale of 10. Moreover, the scientists indicated in their evaluations that the girls exhibited ability, intellectual curiosity, and a sense of responsibility, and were definately as able as were the boys. In other words, the vociferous monopoly of the boys during classroom discussion turns out to be relatively insignificant when examining the more covert qualities of the participating male and female students.