Selecting whose words to trust profoundly impacts children's learning behaviours. This study investigated Western and East Asian children's trust preferences for informants based on social dominance and its potential association with cultural factors. Sixty-six European American children in the United States (M = 5.44 years, SD = 0.80 years) and…

In this study, maternal socialization goals in early childhood were linked to qualities of children's self in middle childhood, while also considering maternal education and child gender. Estonian mothers (N = 209; M[subscript age] = 33.6; 52.2% had university education) provided ratings of their socialization goals for children (52.2% girls;…

Parenting programs around the world target components of the "Nurturing Care Framework" (NCF)--including responsive caregiving and early learning--to improve early childhood development (ECD). However, it is difficult to optimally design culturally relevant programs without knowing how these components align with local cultural beliefs.…

Measures of parasympathetic regulation, such as respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), predict executive function outcomes, including inhibitory control, across childhood. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia augmentation tends to be associated with more maladaptive outcomes, compared to RSA suppression, but the literature regarding RSA profiles and…

Attention control (AC) is thought to play an important role in the development of inhibitory control (IC) in children, yet there are few longitudinal studies of this association. This study used a prospective parent-child adoption design (N = 361 children) to examine whether maternal warmth at child age 27 months moderated the link between AC…

Diverse mechanisms account for the familial aggregation of certain personality traits and externalizing psychopathology. We explored the roles of positive and negative parenting as mediators of longitudinal associations between parents' maladaptive personality traits and their children's inattention/hyperactivity problems. We collected self,…

This study explored how physical punishment (PP) and other parenting approaches may predict school readiness outcomes. By using the Canada-wide representative data, 5,513 children were followed over a 2-year period. Caregivers reported on their use of PP and other parenting approaches (i.e., literacy and learning activities and other disciplinary…

This study examined whether parental alcohol use in adolescence, adulthood, and for mothers, during pregnancy, was related to their young children's functioning in terms of their on-time development as indicated by the number of developmental areas in which children experienced delay. Observed parenting practices and family socioeconomic status…

The present study examined the interplay among negative emotionality, responsive parenting and socio-cognitive developmental outcomes (i.e., communication, personal-social and problem-solving outcomes) in about 1620 Korean children using three waves of longitudinal data spanning the first 2 years of their life. Results from the Structural Equation…

Observation of parental sensitivity in a standard procedure, in which caregivers are faced with the same level of infant demand, enables the comparison of sensitivity "between" caregivers. We developed an ecologically valid standardized setting using an infant simulator with interactive features, the Leiden Infant Simulator Sensitivity…

The study compares mothers' conversation with their 4-year-old children about two past events in two autonomy-oriented (35 German and 42 Swedish families), one relatedness-oriented (22 Cameroonian Nso families) and one autonomy-relatedness oriented (38 Estonian families) contexts. German mothers were rather similar to Swedish mothers in talking a…

Maternal responsive-didactic caregiving (RDC) and infant advanced object play were investigated in a sample of 400 mothers and their 10-month-old infants during video-recorded semi-structured play interactions. Three maternal behaviours: contingent response, cognitively stimulating language and autonomy-promoting speech were coded and infant…

The present study extends the spillover and crossover hypotheses to more carefully model the potential interdependence between parent-parent interaction quality and parent-child interaction quality in family systems. Using propensity score matching, the present study attempted to isolate family processes that are unique across African American and…

Maternal self-efficacy (MSE) has been shown to be important, yet little is known about how it develops over time and whether increasing knowledge about child development and parenting results in feeling more efficacious, especially for first-time mothers. Furthermore, research is lacking about whether increased maternal self-efficacy results in…

Mothers' distress is a correlate of their children's elevated behaviour problems and symptoms. Parenting practices have been shown to mediate these associations, but few studies have observed parenting or focused on parents at risk of child abuse. In this study of 269 high-risk mothers and their young children (M?=?4.2?years), structural…