Effects of Home Environment on Children's Development A Comparative Study

Home is the first environment that children encounter which forms the bedrock through which factors that promote their physical, cognitive, social and emotional development are anchored. These promotive factors vary from one home to another. The main objective of carrying out this study was to compare and determine effects of home environment on children's development. For this study, we employed a case-control study design where we had two study groups; Nairobi study group and Bratislava (study control) group. Sample size for the Nairobi study group was 24 respondents while that of Bratislava was 20 respondents. Respondents to this study were par- ents of young children aged 6-10 years. We used Middle Childhood Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment Inventory (MC-HOME), a standardized questionnaire developed by Prof. Robert Bradley and Prof. Bettye Caldwell to measure home environments of children. We used the Shapiro-Wilk test to determine whether research data were normally distributed and student t for independent sample to compare means of the two study groups. This study found a difference of means between the two study groups (p=0.005, n=44). The Bratislava study group had a higher mean (mean =42.35, Standard deviation=6.73) compared to the Nairobi study group (Mean =34.21, Standard deviation= 11.27). The two study groups deferred on encouraging maturity, learning materials and opportunity, and physical environment. We also found similarities between the two groups in terms of parental responsivity, setting of emotional climates, family companionship and family integration. We thus, concluded that the four factors that influence development children in home environments namely: proximal processes; Characteristics of the caregiver; Environmental context; time variance from one home to another. This may now explain why developmental trajectories of children are never the same.