The Relationship Between Maternal Parenting Knowledge and Infant Development Outcomes: Evidence from Rural China

The importance of this first years of life for long-term developmental outcomes has prompted researchers to search for specific factors that may be related to early childhood development. One of the factors that may influence the outcomes of children is parenting knowledge. Parenting knowledge is thought to be associated with the cognitive and social-emotional development of children, as it allows caregivers to better understand and interact with their children in an appropriate and enriching manner. This study uses data from a sample of 648 rural Chinese infants aged 6-24 months to examine the relationship between the parenting knowledge of caregivers and early childhood developmental outcomes. Both our unadjusted and adjusted models show that caregiver knowledge of infant development is positively and significantly related to the social-emotional and language development of infants. However, the relationship between knowledge of infant development and neither cognitive nor motor development were significant. Overall, our findings suggest that the low levels of caregiver knowledge on infant development are correlated with poor developmental outcomes among infants in rural China.