Electrode deactivation in cochlear implant users: impact on speech perception and objective measures.

Clinical Psychology has highlighted how early experiences are important for child development and how these occur mainly in the context of parent-child relationships. Negative parental affective states, particularly depression and anxiety, have an adverse impact on parent-child interactions and child development. Thus, offspring of postnatally depressed mothers evidence child attachment insecurity, negative affective outcomes in childhood (assessed at 8 years) and adolescence (assessed at 13 and 16 years), and compromised cognitive and behavioural development (Murray ., ). Infants of anxious mothers show heightened stress responses, lower social engagement, and are twice as likely to develop anxiety as children of non-anxious mothers (Lawrence ., ). Early parenting interventions have been shown to improve child outcomes. For example, parent-child play and shared reading interventions enhance children’s cognitive and linguistic skills as well as their social-emotional development, and reduce externalizing behaviours at 36 months (Weisleder ., ). Far less is known, however, about the impact of such programmes on parents, and particularly their mental state. Although a meta-analysis of shared reading programmes involving parents and children aged 0–6 years old concluded that they may have some positive impact on parents’ psychosocial functioning, only three of the included studies assessed parental depression, and none identified a benefit (Xie ., ). A structured parent-child shared reading intervention principally directed at improving children’s cognitive development in early childhood was developed by Murray and Cooper (Cooper ., ), the ‘’ (DBS) programme. This intervention has been evaluated in several countries including South Africa with children aged 23 and 27 months (Dowdall ., ), Lesotho with 1–5 years old children (Tomlinson ., ), Brazil with children aged between 30 and 42 months (Murray , ), and England with children between 28 and 45 months of age (Murray ., ) with positive effects on both parenting and children’s development. A consistent finding across all the studies is significant benefits for caregiver-child interactions during book-sharing, particularly in terms of parental (appropriate and warm responsiveness to the child) and parent-child .