Parents' Role in Normal Infant Development - Research Paper Sample

For a normal infant development of an infant, the parent plays a huge role in the normal development. Parents are involved in the lives of the infants from the minute they are born. Parents impact on the infant affects them on different sides such as the healthy growth of the baby and other forms of development within the infant that affect the infant later on in life. It is important to focus on both the roles a parent plays in the social, emotional development of an infant as well as the physical and cognitive development of the baby (Blomqvist et al., 2012). This shows how much a parent is involved in the normal development of an infant. They actually contribute 80% of the infants early and late development (Newman & Newman, 2017). This is seen the minute the parent, and the toddler begins their lives together as a family.

Parents and the children establish different relations which are influenced by different reasons, and this happens to provide the basics of the infants social and emotional development. Research by () shows that these early parent-child relationships play a huge role in preparing a stage for their child's emotional well-being as well as the child's social relations with other people later in their life. This shows the magnitude of this connection between the infant and the parent. A good example from the study was that the parents who happened to be consistently sensitive and responsive to their infant happened to play a huge role in the child's development of trust and attachment to the parent (Affleck et al., 2012). This basically results in parent-infant synchronization which is later expressed in toddler autonomy and their explorational behaviors.

The most important role in parenting an infant is developing a sense of trust for the infant. This gives the infant a secure feeling with the parents of the caregivers. Different research has been conducted to try and analyze this relationship of trust between the infant and the parent, and it has been seen to be an international phenomenon. The research by ((Newman & Newman, 2017)) shows that the quality of parent-infant interactions plays a huge role in the shaping of the infant's trust or mistrust senses between them and the parents. This results in a parallel development of secureness within the child and the parent as trust develops. Research showed that parents of children with strong trust exhibit the following; they are more sensitive, they are more consistent with the things they do towards the infant, they are more contingently responsive as compared to the other parents, they are more likely to hold there infant, they are less intrusive, less irritable by different actions of the infant and less tense. This lead to the normal development of the infant's security attachment which we can say that it relies on whether or not they receive contingent responsiveness or not from their parents (Galland et al., 2012). For the parent to allow this to happen, they let their infants get involved in roles of elicitor as well as provide them with the attention they require. Different signs such as crying of the infants show different means of communication and the highly involved parents are aware of all these patterns and the minute they respond to these patterns the infants start developing the sense of trust as well as secureness within their parents.

From the analysis of research by (Galland et al., 2012) it clearly shows that the parental sensitivity, as well as the infant attachment in relation to contingent responsiveness, happen to have different sorts of the impact of the infant. They can be classified as both short-term effects as well as long-term effects. For the short term effect, a child with a well-developed trust with the parents seems to cry less and is mostly the peaceful child. These are those small children who give the parents less hard time in relation to feeding or sleeping time it is easy to identify their problems and can be easily resolved unlike those children with no trust development the short-term effects include less face to face play which is opposite with the other infants as well as hard to understand. The children with high attachment demonstrate exploratory behaviors than those who do not demonstrate the secure attachment. The long-term effect as well starts with the relationship skill of the children. The infants who demonstrate the secure attachment happen to have good social skills as well as a wide range of cognitive skills (Hiscock et al., 2015). They are usually the outgoing characters since their development was based on strong relationships with other. The children also turn out to be more compliant than those that had less attachment during the infancy state since they never had that chance to develop any relations with their parents which as covered lays the foundations of the child's social life. This also affects the child's behavior and research by (Lyons-Ruth, 2015) showed that this results to negative behaviors. Hence these relations with the parents affect the social lives of the childrens later life.

The trust bond created between the infant and the parent also result to the future decisions the child makes later in their growth development. The children with high attachment with the parents find it is easy to interact with the parents and address different issues which the pass-through in life because they trust their parents. Different issues in early childhood require the help of a parent. Personal life decisions for the children become way easier for them due to the parents guiding hand (Sigelman, C. K., & Rider, 2014). This is different for the children who had little attachment to their parents. They face different life issues as well but can due to the fact that can hardly trust their parents they do not share these things which end up leading to the wrong decisions from time to time hence leading to the bad behaviors among others.

Research indicates that later development of a child directly linked to the early development of the particular child. A child's social life is built on trust, and this is evident in (Schappin et al., 2013) research. The trust gained by a child during infancy is closely related to the connection the child has between them and the parents. As seen before different factors do contribute to this. Children with an affected foundation in relation to trust find it hard building these connections later in life. Children in this position end up getting different psychological challenges on who to trust and whom not to trust. ((Schappin et al., 2013)) Claims that this may affect the child in two separate ways either the child may get into a position of looking for the trust they never had in life or distance themselves completely from the whole trust concept. The research gave more details in relation to this and emphasized the dangers of both situations.

The first situation of a child with the fear to trust may lead to a child becoming more of a loner. This is due to the fact that the child does not wish to interact or associate with anyone. This generally affects the child's personality, and different children end up getting into an antisocial state. It becomes hard for them to connect with anyone since they lack the need for such things. On the other hand, this the child grows to look for trust anywhere possible this thing makes the child vulnerable due to the fact that they feel they lack something within them an in return look for it in every place. The gap is the responsibility of the parents to feel it but since this gap is where the child tries to get it felled (Sigel et al., 2014). Different cases of children trusting the wrong people have been the scene all over our growth environment. Later development of children gets them into gangs where they feel they got people to trust among other reasons. This has been evident in many cases.

Parents roles in the infancy development are way beyond just trust. They involve the child's daily health as well. The parents feeding habits, for instance, affects the infants' health. A mother using drugs stands a higher risk of affecting the child's health (Obsuth et al., 2014). These are the physical roles associated with the parenting of an infant. Protection of the child against different threats such as diseases for instance. Parents also influence other things around the infants such as communication. The continuous interactions with the infant create a learning notion of the infant. An infant in an environment with social parents affects the child later development. They are more interactive as well as their speech adaption rate as compare to the children brought up in a different setup.

References

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Galland, B. C., Taylor, B. J., Elder, D. E., & Herbison, P. (2012). Normal sleep patterns in infants and children: a systematic review of observational studies. Sleep medicine reviews, 16(3), 213-222.

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Schappin, R., Wijnroks, L., Venema, M. M. U., & Jongmans, M. J. (2013). Rethinking stress in parents of preterm infants: a meta-analysis. PloS one, 8(2), e54992.

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