CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the Study
Children from different socioeconomic backgrounds have divergent academic, language, and social emotional outcomes yet there are no universally accepted mechanisms to explain this association between maternal socioeconomic status and children’s development. Many children have parents who are able to meet their needs, but other children are at risk of not receiving early interpersonal interactions needed for healthy development because parents are not aware of infants’ developmental needs (Lerner & Nightingale, 2016; Weber, Fernald, & Diop, 2017).
Cognitive development are the mental skills that are used in the process of acquiring knowledge and solving problems, including reasoning, memory, visual-spatial skills, and attention. These include competencies such as socio-emotional regulation, self-control, conscientiousness, locus of control, and the ability to work and interact with others (Burks, Carpenter, Goette & Rustichini, 2009; Hanushek & Woessmann, 2012).
Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood (Bjorklund, 2004). Mental development and cognitive development are used interchangeably in several literatures. Pica (2003) described mental development as how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of his or her world through the interaction of genetic and learned factors. Among the areas of mental development are information processing, intelligence, reasoning, language development, and memory.
It was once believed that infants lacked the ability to think or form complex ideas and remained without cognition until they learned language. It is now known that babies are aware of their surroundings and interested in exploration from the time they are born. From birth, babies begin to actively learn. They gather, sort, and process information from around them, using the data to develop perception and thinking skills (Thornton, 2003). However, parents play a role in their children’s mental development.
Although pupils are preverbal, parents’ responsive language and emotional sensitivity provides information infants need to learn about their environment and about themselves as social beings (Lock & Zukow-Goldring, 2010). The types and amounts of interactions pupils engage in during the first 2 years of life set the beginning of their trajectories for language and executive control as well as their expectations for social interactions (Bigelow & Power, 2016). These trajectories and expectations provide the foundation for infants’ first 4 years of life as observed in effects on brain architecture and function (Bernier, Calkins, & Bell, 2016). The amount of early interpersonal stimulation infants experience predicts their ease or difficulty managing current and future interpersonal relationships (Baker & Rimm-Kaufman, 2014; Hedenbro & Rydelius, 2014).
Globally, the importance of women socio-economic status (SES) in the family is a commonplace fact. SES affects overall human functioning, including development across the life span, physical and mental health. Variance in socioeconomic status, including disparities in the distribution of wealth, income, and access to resources, affects everyone; however, women are overrepresented among those living in poverty. Women are more often responsible for raising children and are increasingly likely to raise children alone. This fact is one of the many reasons that the socioeconomic standing of women is of great importance to the well-being of future generations and as such to this study. Everyone benefits from an increased focus on the foundations of socioeconomic inequities and efforts to reduce the deep gaps in socioeconomic status in the United States and abroad (Birrell & Khoo, 2005). Inequities in wealth and quality of life for women are long standing and exist both locally and globally (Keith & Benson, 1992). Historically and presently, in the United States, men are paid more than women, even when they have the same level of education and are in the same occupational field (Ibid). Findings of the American Census Survey (ACS) indicate that among individuals possessing a graduate or professional degree, on average, the women earned about 66.4% of what the men earned (Shin, 2005). While they make less money, women are more likely to be single heads of household than men, thus bearing the responsibility of raising children with fewer economic resources. In 2006, there were about 14 million female heads of household, compared to 5 million male heads of household in the United States (Shin, 2005).