NURTURE

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To Nurture children may be the most important contribution parents can offer their children. Nurturing by parents predicts that a child will develop into a competent and healthy adult. Nurturing can be challenging because a family's emotional resources often are overextended. Children also have different needs and different preferences for nurturing behavior. By learning to attend to their children's needs, by building a positive relationship, and by sending consistent messages of love and support, parents can be effective nurturers.

Critical Nurture Practices

• Express affection and compassion.
• Foster children's self-respect and hope.
• Listen and attend to children's feelings and ideas.
• Teach kindness.
• Provide for the nutrition, shelter, clothing, health, and safety needs of one's children.
• Celebrate life with one's children.
• Help children feel connected to family history and cultural heritage.

Examples of Specific Program Objectives for Nurture

The following parent behaviors serve as examples of more specific outcome objectives based on the critical practices for Nurture:

• Plan and engage in activities that bring mutual enjoyment with their children.
• Express their feelings of affection in both word and action.
• Take the time to talk with children to help them feel significant as well as to develop their verbal, intellectual, and social skills.
• Understand and implement strategies for becoming involved with children, such as appropriate play with a child, moving to a child's level (on the floor to play), using a gentle tone of voice, and reading books with a child.
• Show respect for each member of the family, including children.
• Adjust the way they talk with children to show respect for the child's age and affirm the child's dignity and worth.
• Provide sincere praise.
• Maintain a healthy balance between encouragement/nurturance and discipline/setting limits so that the overall feeling of the parent-child relationship is positive.
• Help children develop a sense of heritage based on experiences shared about ancestors.
• Help children develop a sense of spirituality by involving them in related activities in the home and/or community.
• Show sensitivity to how each child interprets parental love, including taking time to do things that the child enjoys and taking time to understand the child's feelings.
• Listen more responsively to children.
• Give significance to children's place within the family by discussing the circumstances surrounding their births and the selection of their names.

What We Know about Nurture

Effective parental nurturing may be the single best predictor of successful child outcomes. Nurturance has been variously called support, love, acceptance, affection, and warmth. Rollins and Thomas (1979, p. 320) have defined this construct as "behavior manifested by a parent toward a child that makes the child feel comfortable in the presence of the parent and confirms in the child's mind that he is basically accepted and approved as a person by the parent." For decades, nurturance has been identified as a key variable in childrearing (Symonds, 1939; Becker, 1964; Baumrind, 1967).

Research in parent-child attachment (Ainsworth, 1978) stresses the importance of prompt and sensitive responding by parents to children's needs. Nurturance becomes the basis for a continuing relationship. Maccoby and Martin (1983) suggested in their review of research that the combination of warm, nurturant parenting together with clear standards and reasonable control resulted in children who are competent, responsible, independent, confident, achievement-oriented, and able to control aggression. Belsky (1984) found that attentive, warm, and nonrestrictive maternal behaviors contributed to the intellectual development of young children. High maternal warmth is a protective factor against risks associated with peer rejection and behavior problems among six-year-old children (Patterson, et al., 1989).

Parental encouragement of emotional expressiveness was positively associated with competence in preschool children as assessed by teacher ratings (Roberts and Strayer, 1987). Coombs and Landsverk (1988) found that warm feelings of closeness with parents, both mothers and fathers, typified adolescent abstainers from drugs. Fathers who developed and maintained warm relationships, compared with those that did not, experienced greater success in inhibiting drug involvement. In his review of the research, Dix (1991) indicated that there was considerable evidence that the more positive the emotions parents experience and express, the more favorable is the caregiving environment for children. Nurturance has so consistently been found to be important in the raising of children that it has sometimes been called the super-variable in parenting.

Nurturing has both direct and indirect impacts on children. In addition to its primary effects, nurturance has been shown to impact how other parenting behaviors influence children (Darling and Steinberg, 1993; Pettit and Mize, 1993). For example, a child will respond more positively to the disciplinary efforts of a nurturing than a punitive parent. Parents who nurture their children are likely to be more powerful models for other behaviors they hope to encourage in their children (Eisenberg, 1992). Parents can engage in specific nurturing behaviors and establish a nurturing environment.

Absence of parental nurturing can impair child competence. In a summary of the research, Denham (1989) concluded that infants and toddlers cope poorly with stress when mothers are emotionally nonresponsive or express mostly negative emotions. Mothers who express much positive effect and whose emotional style is resourceful, enthusiastic, and optimistic have infants who exhibit more positive affect and social behavior. Infants who grow up in this environment are less likely to be depressed as nine-year-olds.

Six-year-olds who are insecurely attached to their mothers are more likely to be reported by their teachers as having behavior problems in school (Cohn, 1990).

Bulimic behavior in adolescents was found to be positively correlated with inconsistent affection by parents (Scalf-McIver and Thompson, 1989). Adolescent mothers who believed that babies are likely to become spoiled if the mother is responsive and affectionate were less supportive than those who believed that infants should be talked to and given considerable leeway in exploring their surroundings (Luster and Rhoades, 1989).

Parental nurturing is clearly linked to prosocial behavior. ZahnWaxleret, et al., (1979) found that parents who responded positively to their children's upset had children who responded positively to upset in others and were more often prosocial in their behavior. In contrast, Main and George (1985) reported that toddlers who were abused by their parents became emotionally distressed by their peers' emotional upset and attacked them physically and verbally.

Nurturance alone may be insufficient to promote generosity and helping. When used in combination with modeling, high standards for altruism and victim-centered reasoning, nurturance can be a powerful catalyst for prosocial behavior (Eisenberg, 1992).