Does mother age influence the development of offspring walking and talking?
Loading...
Date
2014-09-05
Authors
De Jaeger, Amy
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Older motherhood (after 30 years) is increasingly common, yet relatively little is known about the relation between mother age and child development. Mother age has been linked to offspring cognitive and motor development, but those studies measured mother age with crude categorizations (e.g., older vs. younger) and varied their focus from one developmental period to another (e.g., infancy vs. early childhood). The present study used a more sensitive measure of mother age and examined both motor and language development in the same children at the same age. Mother age was considered within an ecological systems framework as a predictor of variability in offspring walking and talking. Survival analysis was used to examine a large archival dataset in Study One to create an initial snapshot of mother age effects. Study Two used online methodologies to clarify mother age effects by examining early motor (walking) and language (gestures) development in a heterogeneous sample. Older motherhood was associated with delayed walking and talking during infancy (0 to 18 months), but advanced receptive vocabulary in childhood (4 and 5 years). Such results confirm the general idea that variation in mother age has implications for offspring development, but the pattern and direction of influence appears to vary by content domain and by age. The use of a one-size-fits-all norm for typical development and for assessing developmental delay is ill-advised because children of younger and older mothers may differ in systematic ways.
Description
Keywords
child, development, mother, age