Study urges Pakistani families to ‘stop kidding around’
* The shorter the gap between your children, the less their mental development, says AKU study
* The larger the joint family, the smarter the children
* However the larger the joint family, the more strain on the mother
Daily Times Monitor
KARACHI: A recent study into the intellectual development of children in Karachi has discovered three important things: If you have your children quickly one after another their mental development, especially of the younger ones, is less than if you space your children out. The intellectual development of children benefits greatly from a joint family system in which many aunts, uncles and grandparents are available for daily interaction. However, the more children you have, the less their intellectual development is.
The average family size in the study was 5.75 persons with a mean birth interval of 1.78 years. The study appeared as an article titled ‘The role of family configuration in early childhood intellectual development in the context of an extended family system in Pakistan’ in the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine this January.
Social environment plays an important role in the mental development of a child. But these issues have largely been ignored in South Asian countries and factors identified as a hurdle to development have mostly been identified in western contexts. Due to a lack of local theories, Western theories on child mental development are used in South Asian countries including Pakistan, despite the unique social circumstances in these countries.
One theory of child development is the ‘confluence theory of intelligence’ that states that the intellectual growth of every member of a family is interdependent and an individual’s growth rate is a function of the family configuration. The average of the intellectual or mental age level of all the family members indicates the intellectual environment at home. The child’s mental and intellectual development is dependent upon family size, the time distance between each child’s birth and the order of birth. As adults leave or are added to a family, pronounced changes occur in the intellectual environment. If the family size increases because children are born quickly one after another, the average intellectual environment drops for the younger children.
Almost all of this type of research has been conducted in developed countries and the main findings are: the bigger the size of the family the less the intellectual development of children, more so in poor than rich families. Also, family size affects speech more than the nonverbal aspect of the mental development. And if children are born at short intervals to each other, it has an unfavorable effect on the IQ irrespective of who is born in what order.
Family size is a significant component of the theory, but family composition changes with change in the socio-cultural settings.
In contrast to the nuclear family trend in developed countries that resulted from rapid industrialization and urbanization in the latter half of the 20th century, the majority of the populations in developing countries, particularly in Asia, continue to follow the pattern of extended family households. Interestingly, nuclear family is not a unique phenomenon in the West anymore; the proportion of extended family setup is on the rise due to various social and economic reasons.
This research is part of a larger cross-sectional study designed to assess factors associated with the cognitive competence of children between four to five years of age in Karachi, Pakistan. The study was conducted in the area served by the Aga Khan Health Services of Pakistan as there is a health delivery system which serves a mix of populations such as Sindhis, Punjabis, Gilgitis and related, as well as immigrants from India, mostly Gujaratis.
Children, who were registered at the main Mother and Child Health Centres (MCH) of the AKHSP Karachi and were born between July 1st 1993-June 30th 1994 with traceable birth records at the maternity homes, were considered. The required information was collected on 342 children who were extensively tested. The average age of the sample was 55.34 months with 48 percent of the sample boys.
The effect of the number of siblings showed a significant negative association with the child’s intellectual score, while the association between the number of co-residents and the intellectual scores was also statistically significant but positive. In the next model, when rank of the index child and birth interval between the index child and adjacent siblings were also introduced in the model, the effect of the number of co-residents and the number of siblings on the child’s intellectual scores remained significant, showing robustness.
The main finding observed in our study is that a direct association exists between the intellectual development of children and the number of co-residents in the family.
The extended family setup in South Asia, commonly referred to as the “joint family” has co-residents who are mainly relatives from the child’s father’s side.
These households are characterized by a high level of shared residence between the generations and exchange of knowledge and practice. The co-residents’ role is central in terms of the availability of additional valuable support and assistance for the child’s wellbeing in the family. For the most part, relatively younger members (aunts, cousins) are involved in the provision of extensive help and direct care of the child, while relatively older members (grandparents, uncles) are primarily of indirect help by providing affection to the child and giving relevant advice to the parents. They have more free time to interact with the child resulting in emotional support, sensory stimulation and various learning experiences.
But it is important to note that there have been negative effects reported on the mental health of the mothers in extended family systems. If family size increases with decreasing inter-sibling intervals, then average intellectual environment decreases for children of later birth order and vice versa.
It is interesting to note that number of children consistently has the opposite effect on the child cognitive development as compared to the number of co-residents. Additional children in a family might limit the amount of resources available. Furthermore, an increase in the number of children would also limit the amount of interactions with the adults. This could result in less sensory stimulation being available through interaction with mature family members.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C02%5C22%5Cstory_22-2-2007_pg12_8
Ismailimail 