Low Birth Weight and Parental Expectations

One topic that I thought was interesting in The Starting Gate was how they talked about the fact that mothers with children who are low birth weight seem to automatically have lower expectations of their child. This is thought to be because of the fact that it is widely known that children who are born of a low birth weight show complications in certain areas of development. Although this is unfortunate, it is extremely true, and according to the book, it could be one of the reasons there is a "seemingly" direct biological connection found between birth weight and educational attainment. Low birth weight seems to affect the attitude of mothers in a deep way, so that even later in life the mother will take care of the low birth weight child in a different, more special way than they care for the other children. This is where the concept of maternal recall bias was introduced (26). This is the fact that if both or all of the mothers children are born at a low birth weight but only one of those children has developmental problems and is having trouble with their education, she will be ore likely and more readily able to remember the fact that the child was of a low birth weight. In a 1990 regional study at the University of Hamilton in Ontario , Canada (The Journal of Pediatrics), the researchers conducted a study in which they tested two groups of children one that was not low birth weight and one that was. They had to perform IQ tests, reading, spelling, math, motor performance, and visual motor integration tests. It turned out that that low birth weight children had significantly lower scores on all the tests than the others did. The connection between low birth weight and later developmental problems is readily available, however, it is still not completely clear what the connection is, if any, between low birth weight and education attainment. The parents do expect the child to be able to have difficulty with a lot more things and learn slower, however, I feel that in most situations the parents would not act any different toward the child because of this, but instead just try to push him or her like they would push and motivate any other child. The low birth weight child of the family should not be treated much differently in terms of love, kindness care, respect, and other values such as those. They should only get special attention up to a point because otherwise the child will feel smothered later in life, like they have so any restrictions, just because of something that happened when they were born. The child should eventually become like all the others and gain some sort of control over his or her life, minus the first few years of course. The statement that parental expectations of children with low birth weight are lower, is disheartening because the parents should at least have the hope that their child can hopefully become as close as they can get to the education level of everyone of his or her classmates. 

Unfortunately, this might not be possible, but the parents should still expect that the child can do normal, everyday things and have good learning experiences to get as close as they can to a great education level. P