Objective: Child protection, as primarily applied toward narrow corrective intervention, has been judged to be inadequate in dealing with the wide variety of forms and levels of physical, psychological and sexual violence to which children are subjected throughout the world. Concern about this state of affairs has grown as a part of a global…

In this study, the authors assessed children's ability to use information overheard in other people's conversations to judge the reality status of a novel entity. Three- to 9-year-old children (N = 101) watched video clips in which two adults conversed casually about a novel being. Videos contained statements that explicitly denied, explicitly…

Research connecting children's understanding of mental states to their peer relations at school remains scarce. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that children's understanding of mental states in the context of a faux pas--a social blunder involving unintentional insult--is associated with concurrent peer rejection. The present report…

This article revisits radical playgrounds of the past to offer a productive dialogue with recent debates on how child environments can foster citizenship and community. Joan Littlewood's playground projects are familiar examples of theatre techniques being applied to develop children's sense of belonging in a city. This essay considers the less…

No evidence had been provided so far of newborns' capacity to give a matching response to 2D stimuli. We report evidence from 18 newborns who were presented with three types of stimuli on a 2D screen. The stimuli were video-recorded displays of tongue protrusion shown by: (a) a human face, (b) a human tongue from a disembodied mouth, and (c) an…

It is not known whether reproductive factors early in the mother's life influence risk of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We assessed maternal age at menarche, menstrual cycle characteristics during adolescence, oral contraceptive use prior to first birth, body shape, and body mass index (BMI) in association with ASD using binomial regression in…

Susan Isaacs made a significant impression on the world of early childhood education during the first half of the twentieth century. She ranks alongside Froebel and Dewey, as one of the pioneers of child-centred education. As Jody Hall has written, "the life, work and legacy of Isaacs serve as a witness to the value of the curiosity of children."…

This article, using the National Child Development Study, estimates the causal relationship between parents' schooling and children's cognitive and non-cognitive development using the 1947 compulsory schooling legislation in Great Britain. The least squares estimates suggest strong correlations between parental education and these developmental…

This study traces patterns of attendance, times of arrival and departure, and policies and practices surrounding enrollment and moving children from classroom to classroom in a child care center. It appears that children's efforts to acquire competence in developing friendships with their peers not only depends on their own capacities, but is also…

This study addresses the extent to which insecure and disorganized attachments increase risk for externalizing problems using meta-analysis. From 69 samples (N = 5,947), the association between insecurity and externalizing problems was significant, d = 0.31 (95% CI: 0.23, 0.40). Larger effects were found for boys (d = 0.35), clinical samples (d =…

Recent studies have demonstrated infants' pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non-verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator's utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal…

Growth mixture models (GMMs; B. O. Muthen & Muthen, 2000; B. O. Muthen & Shedden, 1999) are a combination of latent curve models (LCMs) and finite mixture models to examine the existence of latent classes that follow distinct developmental patterns. GMMs are often fit with linear, latent basis, multiphase, or polynomial change models…

This study investigated at what point in development 3- to 6-year-old children begin to demonstrate counterfactual reasoning by controlling for fortuitously correct answers that result from basic conditional reasoning. "Basic conditional reasoning" occurs when one applies typical regularities (such as "If 'whenever' it doesn't rain the street is…

Variations in phenotype reflect the influence of environmental conditions during development on cellular functions, including that of the genome. The recent integration of epigenetics into developmental psychobiology illustrates the processes by which environmental conditions in early life structurally alter DNA, providing a physical basis for the…

Learning is defined as a change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience. It is clear that the fetus can learn by means of habituation, classical conditioning and exposure learning. These types of learning will be discussed in relation to learning in the womb and the memory of learned material after birth. Furthermore, the potential…