Parental behavior and child interactive engagement: a longitudinal study on children with a significant cognitive and motor developmental delay.
Real-time parent responses and child engagement lift each other immediately, but long-term growth stays uneven without steady caregiver coaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Van Keer et al. (2020) filmed parents and toddlers with big motor and cognitive delays at home. They coded every second to see who did what first.
They returned months later to learn if early back-and-forth predicted later skills.
What they found
Inside one play session, parent smiles or touches boosted child looking and reaching right away. When the child acted first, parents later gave more directions.
Across the whole group, long-term patterns were messy—some kids gained, some stayed flat.
How this fits with other research
The same team showed the same tiny moments a year earlier (Ines et al., 2019). Kids rarely start social moves; parents must open the door.
Vernon (2014) tested an autism play kit that added adult eye contact and small treats. Moment-to-moment gains looked just like the natural ones Ines saw, proving the cycle can be built.
Dai et al. (2025) watched Part C early-intervention visits and found wide swings in how much coaches trained parents. That helps explain why Ines found no steady long-term trend—parents got very different help.
Why it matters
You cannot wait for these children to "warm up." Each time you respond in the second they look or vocalize, you pump energy into the next turn. Use brief labels, wait, and match their posture. The loop is the lesson.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →During play, narrate what the child touches the instant their hand lands, then pause and lean in—count to three to let the child take the next turn.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Knowledge on the long-term interactive interplay between children with a significant cognitive and motor developmental delay and their parents is very scarce. We aimed to characterize the (in)variability and potential mutual influence of parent's interactional style and child interactive engagement throughout early childhood. Every six months over the course of two years, thirty-five parent-child dyads (children aged 6-59 months) living in Flanders (Belgium) or the Netherlands were video-taped during a 15-minute unstructured play situation. Video-taped observations were scored using the Child and Maternal Behavior Rating Scales. No consistent group-level trend was found. Within singular interactions, parent's responsive behavior and child interactive engagement (attention and initiation) seem to be strongly related. Initial child initiation seems to positively predict parents' achievement orientation and directive behavior two years later. Parental responsiveness might be an effective interactional strategy to increase child engagement and higher levels of engagement in children possibly can facilitate parental responsiveness within a concrete interaction. The more initiative children show, the more parents might have hope for developmental benefits resulting from a directive/achievement oriented approach. Further research is warranted applying more differentiated and dynamically evaluated outcome measures and a longer follow-up time frame, with specific attention to inter-individual differences.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2020 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2020.103672