Interpersonal connectedness (IC) is an essential social function across life but is critical for young children. IC begins at birth and is vital to emerging physiological and affect regulation, attachment, communication, and cognition. IC occurs through dynamic interactive behavioral coordination, resulting in an embodied dyadic state of shared…

Background: Typical scaffolding coding schemes provide overall scores to compare across a sample. As such, insights into the scaffolding process can be obscured: the child's contribution to the learning; the particular skills being taught and learned; and the overall changes in amount of scaffolding over the course of the task. Aims: This study…

The authors examined the relative stability and variability of self-regulated learning (SRL) in kindergartners across various contexts (teacher-directed activities, small-group work, and independent work). They assessed the role of temperament and context on children's use of SRL while seeking to identify if there are optimal contexts for…

Background: Mother-child mental state talk (MST) supports children's developing social-emotional understanding. In typically developing (TD) children, family conversations about emotion, cognition, and causes have been linked to children's emotion understanding. Specific language impairment (SLI) may compromise developing emotion understanding and…

The present study examined maternal responses to infants' spontaneous communicative behaviors in a sample of 20 extremely-low-gestational-age (ELGA) infants and 20 full-term (FT) infants during 30 minutes of play interaction when infants were 12 months of age. Relations between maternal responses and infants' communication skills at 12 and 24…

Recent research suggests that caregiver-child extratextual talk during shared book reading facilitates the development of preschool children's oral language skills. This study investigated the effects of the amount of picturebook text on mother-child extratextual talk during shared book reading. Twenty-four mother-child dyads (children aged…

In this study, we videotaped two 10-min. free-play interactions and coded speech acts (SAs) in peer talk of 51 preschoolers (21 ASD, 30 typical), interacting with friend versus non-friend partners. Groups were matched for maternal education, IQ (verbal/nonverbal), and CA. We compared SAs by group (ASD/typical), by partner's friendship status…

Purpose: Marital dissatisfaction and conflict often increase for couples after the birth of a child and are evident in fewer positive family interactions and more negative family interactions. Because exercise is known to increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions, the current study examined the extent to which higher levels of…

This research lends insight into disabling discourses on South Asian families of children with disabilities. It explores immigrant Pakistani maternal understanding of their children's disability, uniquely through an educational perspective, highlighting maternal roles which schools must acknowledge to improve outcomes for children. The findings of…

Purpose: This study explores whether communicative function (CF: reasons for communicating) use differs by socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity, or gender among preschoolers and their mothers. Method: Mother-preschooler dyads (N = 95) from the National Center for Early Development and Learning's (2005) study of family and social environments…

Infants' motor skill development triggers changes in parent-infant interactions, exploration, and play behaviors, particularly during periods of locomotor transitions. We investigated how these transitions reorganized infants' and mothers' explorations of spatial layouts. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed biweekly from the age of 6…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

Given that maternal support promotes healthy social and emotional development in early childhood, it is important to understand the predictors of such support, especially during emotional challenges. In this study, mothers' dispositional distress reactivity (i.e., the tendency toward experiencing distress in response to children's negative…

School readiness is associated with children's subsequent school based-outcomes. School readiness covers skills, behaviors, and attitudes related to whole child development. It is a multidimensional issue regarding readiness in children, and for parents and schools. Therefore, the issue concerns parents, teachers, and researchers. In the present…

Blogs have become a go-to information resource for members of online communities. In this qualitative study we applied uses and gratifications theory (U&GT) to analyze the experiences and perceptions of four mothers of gifted children who maintain blogs about their homeschooling experiences. Data suggest that this novel context and population…