Children's Needs – Parenting Capacity - Digital Education Resource ...

140 Children’s Needs – Parenting CapacityEducation and cognitive abilityExpected abilityChildren in this age group typically attend school regularly and on the whole enjoythe experience. Teachers are generally liked and most children have at least one friend.However, bullying is not uncommon among primary school children. The findingsfrom a survey of schools in England found 28% of primary school children reportedhaving been bullied during the previous term (Oliver and Candappa 2003).Children of 5 and 6 years frequently aspire to do more than they can achieve andeasily become frustrated. There is an increasing ability to concentrate, as childrenare able to screen out distractions and focus on a single issue. By 9 years, childrenare capable of long periods of concentration; they should be proficient in schoolsubjects, able to read, use basic maths and write.Notions of truth and fairness are increasingly understood.Possible impact on education and cognitive abilityThe issues for children of this age relate to academic attainment and learning andbehaviour in school.Research findings on the impact of parental learning disability suggest thatdelays in a child’s cognitive development and learning may arise because geneticfactors affect the child’s capacity to learn, or because of inadequate stimulation andpoor school attendance (Cleaver and Nicholson 2007). Parents with literacy andnumeracy problems will have difficulty in reading stories to children, helping withtheir school work and encouraging learning in general. A caring adult, for example arelative, friend or sympathetic teacher, can provide additional support for learning,and children’s education need not be negatively affected.Maternal depression early in a child’s life has been shown to be a strong predictorof behaviour problems; the more chronic the maternal depression the greater thechild’s behavioural problems (Covell and Howe 2009). A comparison of 5- to 6-yearoldchildren of hospitalised schizophrenic and depressed women with a controlgroup found the children whose mothers were depressed showed most failures ontests of attention and greatest impairment in intellectual ability (Cohler et al. 1977).Further evidence comes from Weissman and colleagues (1986) who noted thatteachers reported children of depressed mothers to be more likely to require specialeducational classes than those whose mothers were not depressed.A review of the research on the impact of domestic violence on children’s schoolperformance for this age group shows conflicting results (Onyskiw 2003). Tocounteract previous methodological limitations Koenen and colleagues (2003) carriedout a large-scale study of twins aged 5 years who were exposed to domestic violencein England. They found strong evidence that domestic violence was associated with