Maternal attitudes and behaviours differentially shape infant early life experience: A cross cultural study.

Early life environments afford infants a variety of learning opportunities, and caregivers play a fundamental role in shaping infant early life experience. Variation in maternal attitudes and parenting practices is likely to be greater between than within cultures. However, there is limited cross-cultural work characterising how early life environment differs across populations. We examined the early life environment of infants from two cultural contexts where attitudes towards parenting and infant development were expected to differ: in a group of 53 mother-infant dyads in the UK and 44 mother-infant dyads in Uganda. Participants were studied longitudinally from when infants were 3- to 15-months-old. Questionnaire data revealed the Ugandan mothers had more relational attitudes towards parenting than the mothers from the UK, who had more autonomous parenting attitudes. Using questionnaires and observational methods, we examined whether infant development and experience aligned with maternal attitudes. We found the Ugandan infants experienced a more relational upbringing than the UK infants, with Ugandan infants receiving more distributed caregiving, more body contact with their mothers, and more proximity to mothers at night. Ugandan infants also showed earlier physical development compared to UK infants. Contrary to our expectations, however, Ugandan infants were not in closer proximity to their mothers during the day, did not have more people in proximity or more partners for social interaction compared to UK infants. In addition, when we examined attitudes towards specific behaviours, mothers' attitudes rarely predicted infant experience in related contexts. Taken together our findings highlight the importance of measuring behaviour, rather than extrapolating expected behaviour based on attitudes alone. We found infants' early life environment varies cross-culturally in many important ways and future research should investigate the consequences of these differences for later development.

Implementation of a 'was not brought' pathway in paediatric dentistry.

Introduction The dental team play a vital role in ensuring that vulnerable children are followed up and suspected safeguarding concerns are shared, which includes recognising the importance of missed dental appointments. Concerns are less likely to be missed when there are robust pathways in place. This paper aims to discuss the importance of a was not brought (WNB) pathway for children who miss dental appointments and to offer advice on its implementation in practice.Methods A three-cycle retrospective case note review was carried out to identify follow-up children who WNB to their dental appointments, and the follow-up that had occurred as a result.Results In cycle one, 16% of children who were not brought were managed according to the audit standards. Therefore, a WNB pathway was developed and audited three months and 12 months following; cycle two showed 32% adherence with the pathway, and 28% in cycle three. The biggest barrier in all cycles seems to be related to the administration of letters.Discussion Investigators felt that the possible barriers to achieving audit standards were the implementation of a new dictation system, limited time on clinic and a possible anxiety surrounding the management of safeguarding issues.Conclusion Pathways and resources have been made available for dental professionals to use in their practice to guide management of children who were not brought to dental appointments. As we have shown, there are barriers to implementation of such pathways which service providers must work to overcome, to protect the children that we treat and ensure that they are being kept safe in line with General Dental Council standards.

Dominance style is a key predictor of vocal use and evolution across nonhuman primates.

Animal communication has long been thought to be subject to pressures and constraints associated with social relationships. However, our understanding of how the nature and quality of social relationships relates to the use and evolution of communication is limited by a lack of directly comparable methods across multiple levels of analysis. Here, we analysed observational data from 111 wild groups belonging to 26 non-human primate species, to test how vocal communication relates to dominance style (the strictness with which a dominance hierarchy is enforced, ranging from 'despotic' to 'tolerant'). At the individual-level, we found that dominant individuals who were more tolerant vocalized at a higher rate than their despotic counterparts. This indicates that tolerance within a relationship may place pressure on the dominant partner to communicate more during social interactions. At the species-level, however, despotic species exhibited a larger repertoire of hierarchy-related vocalizations than their tolerant counterparts. Findings suggest primate signals are used and evolve in tandem with the nature of interactions that characterize individuals' social relationships.

Dental Bleaching: 'Now I can Smile for my Selfies' - Paediatric Patients' Perspectives.

Children presenting with discoloured teeth commonly suffer from low self-esteem. This paper reports the findings from a questionnaire evaluating changes brought about by dental bleaching and the psychosocial effects of bleaching on 22 patients. All patients reported to like the overall appearance of their teeth following bleaching and reported a significant improvement in mental wellbeing. In the current climate where positive mental health is at the forefront of the minds of commissioners, health care providers, and the general public alike, this service evaluation demonstrates the positive effect that carefully planned dental bleaching can have on the mental wellbeing of under 18-year-olds with discoloured teeth.