Material Culture for Children: Tailoring Clothing to Children’s Buttoning Abilities

• In Event: How Children Learn the Everyday Designed Artifacts of their Culture

Abstract

Buttoning is an adaptive behavior comprised of a suite of motor, planning and spatial skills. Although preschool children readily fit objects into holes, adaptive assessment scales indicate that children do not begin to button clothing independently until the early elementary school years. Yet existing assessment scales typically consist of yes/no checklists, and thus offer limited insight into how children button, or why children encounter challenges in doing so. Here, we describe the process by which children button, and leverage these findings to address whether children’s clothing is optimally designed to promote independent buttoning.

In Study 1 (ongoing), 25 5- to 6-year-old children (13 girls; Mage = 71.77 months), buttoned shirts with either small (9mm diameter) or large buttons (20mm diameter). We examined the number of buttons children correctly inserted on each of four shirts and found that age and button size jointly influenced children’s success at buttoning (Age x Button-Size interaction, Wald χ2 = 4.67, p < .05). Younger children were more proficient with big than small buttons. Children only became equally proficient buttoning small and large buttons at 7 years of age (Figure 1A). We also examined the types of errors children made during buttoning. We classified errors as involving primarily a motor (failed attempt at inserting), planning/monitoring (button skipped, but remaining buttons/holes aligned) or spatial misalignment (insertion of a button into a non-corresponding hole) mistake (Figure 1B). Children often made multiple errors (e.g., failed to button and skipped buttons), and we found that multiple errors decreased with increasing age (Wald χ2 = 9.75, p = .002), suggesting that children were beginning to coordinate the multiple elements of the task.

In Study 2, we performed an environmental scan of children’s clothing to examine button sizes on shirts available to consumers. We visited three major department stores and, using digital calipers, measured the button sizes on every shirt for boys and girls, in sizes 5 and 6, with functional buttons. A total of 274 unique shirts were counted (shirts of the same style but different colors or patterns were considered unique). Button sizes ranged from 5mm-27mm in diameter. A median split was used, and button sizes measuring less than 16mm were classified as small buttons, whereas buttons measuring more than 16mm were classified as large buttons. Button size did not vary as a function of clothing gender. However, when we examined the differences in frequency of small and large buttons, we found that small buttons were more common than large buttons for both girls’ (χ2 = 41.29, p < .001) and boys’ shirts (χ2 = 129.03, p < .001; Figure 2).

Collectively, findings suggest that children’s problems in buttoning often result from coordinating the motor, planning, and spatial elements of this task. By reducing the demands associated with at least one of these elements (larger buttons aid motor control), children’s buttoning can be facilitated. More broadly, discussion will focus on how material culture design can be tailored to children’s emerging skills, and thus optimize performance on tasks of daily living.

Authors

• Blair Youmans, Tulane University
  Presenting Author

• Annabelle H Reese, Tulane University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jeffrey J Lockman, Tulane University
  Non-Presenting Author