SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF INFANT WITH DOWN SYNDROME

Delay in the development of cognitive capacities is a primary consequence of Down syndrome. Despite such cognitive delay, however, young children with Down syndrome can be empathic, affectionate and engaging (Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000).
My last post ended with a question, now with this post it will shad more light to any one who wish to logically give answer to the previous question and to let us know how social and cognitive capacities combine to create characteristic forms of infant-parent interaction in families of children with Down syndrome, and consider how these form of interaction, in turn, regulate and influence other aspect of their social and cognitive development.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE ON COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT.
One possibility is that the form of interaction where the infant is dependent on the mother for engaging its attention within a dyadic social interaction may tend to 'lock in' the infant and make them less likely to spontaneously attend to objects beyond this dyad.
6-month old children with down syndrome tended to look more to their mother than an object during play. If this continues then there is a possibility that infants with down syndrome will not engage in typical 'triadic' , joint attention interactions involving mother, infant and objects with implication for later cognitive development. Triadic interactions emerge in typical infants around the end of the first year, and may b critical for the development of language, flexible thought and meta-cognitive awareness.
In conclusion, these study show that there is a complex relationship between an infant's attentional capacities and maternal behaviour, and that by the middle of the second year this may have evolved into a form of interaction in which Mothers of children with down syndrome act as important mediators of the infant's attention. Mothers may be compensating for constraints in capacities for endogenous attentional control by becoming more directive but also correspondly less sensitive to the infants bids.

Now the question for today is; knowing the importance of the mother to the child with down syndrome as it concern his/her social influence, won't the mother be a distraction to his social development with the environment, and also, what psychological impact will it have on the child when the mother lock up the child whenever she want to go out?

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