The first year of life is increasingly regarded as a ‘critical’ stage of a child's development and of emerging family relationships (Carnegie, 1994). The most frequently studied early indicators of child development include biological factors such as illness at birth, low birthweight and physical disability. In this chapter, we focus on indicators of early child development as measured by developmental delays in gross motor and fine motor development, as well as the development of communicative gestures. The questions used to identify milestones in these domains of development are set out in Table 6.1. Gross motor skills include sitting up, standing and walking; fine motor skills reflect ability to use hands and fingers; communicative gestures include smiling, waving goodbye and other signals to other people. Motor development is generally considered to be an important indicator of the overall rate and level of development during the early months and years after birth (Gesell, 1973; Illingworth, 1975). It influences the nature and sequence in which certain perceptual and cognitive abilities unfold, and the lack of motor competence may hinder the development of those abilities (Bushnell and Boudreau, 1993). There are rapid improvements in locomotor and manipulative skills during the first year of life while gestural language develops at around 9 or 10 months when babies begin to use gestures to ask for things (Bates et al, 1987; Bee, 1994).

Child development is assessed by a set of functional skills or age-specific tasks, called developmental milestones, that most children can do at a certain age range. The study of child development in the MCS is based on a socioecological model of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Sameroff, 1983). Such models underscore the role of multiple influences on children's development, and they conceptualise human development as the active interaction between a child and its context or environment. Developmental capacities, therefore, are thought to be shaped by the child's interactions with their parents and the wider context of which both are part.

Plan of this chapter

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between the child's development and the family environment, examining the relative influences of child, family and environmental factors in shaping individual development during the first year of life.