# Serve and Return among low-income fathers, mothers, and their children

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK · 2021 · $74,330

## Abstract

Project Summary
In 2017, 20% of U.S. children lived in families with incomes below the federal poverty line, among which Black
and Hispanic children represent the highest proportions (29% and 25%, respectively. Child Trends 2019).
Already by 2 years of age, children growing up in poverty have worse language skills than their wealthier
peers,2,3 with this gap growing over time (Fernald et al., 2013; Hoff, 2013). A strong predictor of the language
gap is children’s early home environment, which has unique associations with children’s emerging language
skills beyond a host of demographic characteristics (Reynolds et al., 2019; Rodriguez & Tamis-LeMonda, 2011).
Through social interactions with their caregivers, children learn to communicate effectively and behave in
culturally appropriate ways (Vygotsky, 1978). Specifically, social interactions that are sensitive to children’s
verbal and nonverbal cues (aka “serve and return”; Fisher et al., 2017) are beneficial for language development.
Infants serve through eye gaze, gestures, object exploration, and vocalizations, and when parents return those
serves in a way that is contiguous (close in time) and contingent (meaningful), they are more likely to foster
infants’ language skills (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2014). These types of social interactions are typically examined
between children and mothers in white middle-class families. Despite their significance, however, we know
almost nothing about “serve and return” interactions among low-income families, and even less between
fathers and children. This is especially important given that positively engaged low-income fathers have
children with better language scores than their matched peers (Cabrera et al., 2007). Understanding the degree
to which low-income fathers and mothers engage in “serve and return” during infancy can inform interventions
that augment protective factors already existing at home and reduce risk at school entry. To address these
issues, we examine: (1) the heterogeneity of low-income fathers’ and mothers’ “serve and return” interactions
with their children at 9 and 18 months; (2) the contribution of parents’ demographic and psychological factors
to the frequency of their “serve and return” input to children; (3) the associations between low-income fathers’
and mothers’ “serve and return” interactions with their children at 9 and 18 months and children’s language
skills at 24 and 30 months, controlling for important background factors and quantity of parental speech? We
propose to develop a coding scheme to assess “serve and return” interactions in a sample of 420 low-income
fathers and mothers and their children at 9 and 18 months and will also transcribe all the parent-child videos.
Data are drawn from the Baby Books 2 Project, which is a NICHD-funded longitudinal parenting intervention
targeting first-time, low-income parents and includes an ethnically diverse sample of English- and Spanish-
speaking parents. This research will suppo...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10106799
- **Project number:** 1R03HD104091-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK
- **Principal Investigator:** Natasha J Cabrera
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $74,330
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-03-01 → 2023-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10106799

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10106799, Serve and Return among low-income fathers, mothers, and their children (1R03HD104091-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10106799. Licensed CC0.

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