Cultural learning environments and gender roles play a key role in shaping children's development, particularly regarding their social and emotional skills. However, most work on this topic relies on methods that overlook lived experiences and assume high participant literacy, which may not apply to Majority World contexts. To address these…

Although the role of the home in supporting early childhood development, early learning and school outcomes is well established, the perspectives of caregivers on child development and schooling outcomes are comparatively underexplored. This qualitative study was conducted with caregivers of children aged 6-10 years in Mahikeng, South Africa and…

Self-regulation is the ability to control cognitive, behavioural and social-emotional processes in service of one's goals. In the preschool years, self-regulation develops rapidly, and during this period, it is influenced by the plasticity of the underlying neurofunctional circuits. Since good early self-regulation skills favour positive…

To address the need for interventions targeting social emotional development and mental health of young children in South Africa, the "Mazi Umntanakho" ('know your child') digital tool was co-designed, and piloted with caregivers and 3-5-year-old children involved in home visiting programmes promoting early childhood development. The aim…

While studies have documented neural correlates of language delay in toddlers with developmental conditions, those at genetic risk for language delay, and those born premature, no studies have examined neural correlates in toddlers exhibiting early language delay without known aetiology. This study examines brain morphometry in toddlers with and…

This study investigated inductive reasoning abilities in 3-5-year-old children across perceptual similarity and linguistic label conditions. Sixty-five typically developing children aged 3 to 5 participated in reasoning tasks involving natural and artificial targets. In the experimental design, children learned two contrasting characteristics…

While the relationship between secure attachment and emotion regulation has been extensively investigated, there is relatively little information about the trajectory of emotion regulation in childhood and whether changes in emotion regulation would mediate the relation between mother-child secure attachment and independence. A latent growth…

This narrative review analyzes the visual and auditory advantages that autistic people with speech divergence (A-SD) may have compared with autistic people without speech divergence (A-NoSD) or non-autistic people. Importantly, A-SDs' intelligence and communication skills are often underestimated in research and practice. Further, this paper…

When children are aged around 2 years, many of the early foundations of mathematical skills are developing. Understanding this is important to shed light on theories of mathematical development. Nevertheless, little research has investigated 2-year-olds' early mathematical abilities, with most research focussing on either infants (aged 0-1 years)…

The applied field of "Global Early Childhood Development", developed in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised Rich and Democratic) settings, asserts universal frameworks and understandings of early childhood development pathways. This field advocates for the roll out of parenting interventions aimed at improving child development…

Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challenging to evaluate replications of experimental effects and to relate performance in cognitive tasks to other constructs of interest. In developmental…

There is widespread evidence that children display a mutual exclusivity response upon encountering new words. Children displaying this behaviour will select a novel, name-unknown object in response to a novel label, rather than a familiar, name-known object. The mutual exclusivity response has been viewed as a means of fast-mapping…

On a daily basis, children make decisions about how to negotiate their physical environment. Sometimes they engage in physical tasks that involve risk, requiring them to judge the safety of how to negotiate the environment safely. Individual differences in children's age, sex, physical size, and personality may impact those decisions. We used…

Few studies have examined the developmental pathways linking early pesticide exposure to children's socioemotional problems. Infant temperament is an important early indicator of socioemotional development and may be influenced by early environmental contaminants. However, no study to date has examined the association between household pesticide…

The development of emotional competence is an important milestone during early childhood. Beyond early experience within the family, the (preschool) classroom is a relevant socialisation context, and both teachers and peers may contribute to children's emotion-related outcomes. Tracking changes in the emotion regulation competence of N = 173…