Parenting style impacts cognitive and behavioural outcomes of former preterm infants: A systematic review.
M L M Neel, A R Stark, N L Maitre
PMID 29575031WHAT IT FOUND
In former preterm infants, parenting style was associated with child development, but studies were mostly low quality.
Responsivity was linked to better cognition and behavior; warmth to better behavior; rejection to worse behavior; autonomy support to better language but not behavior.
Key findings
01Parental responsivity was strongly associated with better cognitive outcomes and better behavioral outcomes.
02Parental warmth was strongly associated with better behavioral outcomes, and parental rejection was strongly associated with worse behavioral outcomes.
03Parental autonomy support was associated with improved cognitive scores, including receptive and expressive language, but not with behavioral outcomes.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Most included studies were observational, and the quality of evidence was skewed toward lower quality, so these findings describe associations rather than proven effects. Parenting axes were measured inconsistently, and some axes overlapped, such as responsivity and warmth, which makes it hard to attribute outcomes to one parenting behavior. Cognitive and behavioral outcomes were grouped broadly, so an association for one specific outcome may be hidden by the combined categories. No studies examined parental chaos, and some axes had too few studies or mixed results to support a clear recommendation. Intervention studies were often very low quality, and some delivered several components at once, so the effect of any single parenting component cannot be separated.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article is marked as supported by NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these associations as proof that changing parenting style improves infant development. Most evidence is observational and low quality, and intervention findings involve combined components whose separate effects cannot be identified.