THIS IS A CONTINUATION PROPOSAL TO ANALYZE DATA from a follow-up study which investigated the long-term (5-year) consequences of parents' (mothers' and fathers') teaching strategies on subsequent school adjustment of their communication (CH) and non-communication handicapped (NCH) children. In the original studies it was found that parents' teaching strategies (distancing behaviors) that encourage the child to engage actively in problems solving and in representational thinking (planning and anticipation) related positively to cognitive and IQ performance. For CH children, higher level strategies were more strongly related to cognitive task performance and IQ than they were for NCH children. On the other hand, low-level strategies (high structure and imperative, i.e., didactic strategies) related negatively for both CH and NCH groups. Using these results as a backdrop, the current grant plans to follow these children up, arguing that parental distancing strategies as used initially will impact school adaptation and children's mental health five years later. Since the effects of distancing strategies are hypothesized as persisting, children coming from homes where low-level cognitive demands were used should be at greater risk for adjustment to school than children coming from homes where parents made high-level demands. For CH children in particular, the issue is important for they are said to be at risk for psychiatric disorders or emotional problems in school. One hypothesis is that children coming from high-level distancing homes will show significantly less psychiatric and emotional problems than those coming from low-level distancing homes because the parental strategies will have mitigated the risk aspects. Since about 5-10 of the childhood population is said to have communication handicaps, identification of a familial factor provides a means of not only understanding one source of difficulty, but also provides a basis for remediation and prevention of school failure. Forth CH and 40 NCH children between the ages of 8-1/2 and 14-1/2 from the previous studies were involved as were their parents. CH and NCH children were matched on age, sex and SES, and were from intact families. Multivariate correlations and multiple regression procedures will be used to test the hypotheses of this study. Implications for prevention are presented. All data have been collected and are being coded, but analyses will not be completed by the end of the current grant.
