Kathleen is the daughter of nineteen-year-old Lauren, who is a single parent. Kathleen is five years old and an only child. Her mother is concerned that her verbal skills are not as well developed as those of other children of her age at the care center. Lauren left home to live with her grandmother after learning that she was pregnant. Although her grandmother was supportive to her, Lauren eventually dropped out of school and sought employment as a server at a nearby McDonald's cafe in order to provide for her daughter. However, her relationship with her grandmother deteriorated, leading to her moving out to live on her own. Lauren recently enrolled Kathleen in a daycare center from where she learned of her daughter's verbal skill deficiency. Although Lauren expresses that her daughter has grown normally in all other aspects of development, her parental involvement with her daughter's learning may be associated with the poorly developed verbal skills. This case study focuses on the cognitive development of a child in relation to parental involvement in learning. .
Kathleen exhibits normal physical development because she can play and handle objects as expected while her body weight and height are normal as well. However, Kathleen is lagging behind in cognitive development as illustrated by her underdeveloped verbal skills. In particular, she exhibits a lower vocabulary and language proficiency than that of her peers. For instance, she has problems pronouncing some words and cannot express herself clearly. In addition, although she can write her name correctly, she mixes lower case and upper case letters and cannot count up to twenty items. From the information collected from the interview with Lauren, a clear connection emerges between reduced involvement of the parent with learning of Kathleen and her stunted cognitive development, which is manifested in Kathleen's poor language skills.