Socioeconomic Status of Family And Availability of Home Affordances for Motor Development

Abstract

Stimulating home environment and variety of home affordances are essential for optimum growth and development of an infant, especially motor development at early developmental stages. Affordances in home environment for motor development-infant scale (AHEMD-IS) is a recently developed and validated tool for assessment of home affordances for motor development and it has been used in many studies. However, there is a little data from the Indian subcontinent related to the relation of socioeconomic status of the family and home affordances for childhood development. Main objective of the study was to evaluate the association between the home affordances for motor development and the socioeconomic status (SES) of the family. Total 460 infants in the age group of 3-18 months were enrolled in the study. AHEMD-IS tool was used to evaluate the home affordances and socio-economic status was evaluated from family income, social-class and educational status of the parents by using Kuppuswamy scale. The results of this study showed that in the baseline family profile of the studied families, most of the families were in lower middle class and majority of parents had high school education, most of families had one child or another sibling of the study infant, and two adults residing in the family. On applying Kruskal Wallis test it was found that all aspects of AHEMD-IS had positive correlation with family SES. Socioeconomic status has an important impact on availability of home affordances for motor development; although many dimensions of home affordances have wider scope of modification, so as to customize them for better motor development irrespective of family SES.