The past century has seen vast improvements in our children's health. The infectious diseases that once killed huge numbers of children have largely been conquered. Infant mortality has also fallen markedly, although the United States lags behind other industrialized nations in this and other measures of children's health. Accidents and injuries…

This paper aggregates the academic literature reviewing and reporting interventions for out-of-school children (OOSC) around the world to serve as a guide for potential interventions in South Asia and elsewhere. It complements the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children (OOSCI) South Asia Regional Study (2014). Thus the interventions reviewed…

This article features Childgarden Child Development Center, located in the heart of St. Louis. It's a cheery, bright place with colorful self-portraits by pintsized Picassos hanging from every wall. More than 120 children aged six weeks to eight years old gather at Childgarden each day to learn all about themselves and the world around them. In…

Because patterns of integration of respiration into rhythmic suck-swallow efforts are highly variable, we examined the vagaries of respiratory efforts as they evolve from the first tentative attempts at integration through more complex rhythmic interactions, with a focus on several strategies in which breathing and suck-swallow are coordinated.…

Contemplative education includes practices that aim to help a person cultivate conscious awareness, especially internal self-awareness and awareness of one's connection to the world. Such practices include meditation, movement, and the contemplation of nature. Exploration is under way to determine if these practices might assist young people in…

In this article, the author draws on contemporary science to illuminate the relationship between early play experiences, processes of self-development, and the later emergence of the fractal self. She argues that orientation within social space is a primary function of early play and developmentally a two-step process. With other people and with…

Children's theatre in the UK is thriving. Debates about why children should watch theatre and what educational, emotional and expressive benefits it can provide inform cultural policy on education. Children aged 4-11 are increasingly taken to watch tailored theatre performances, yet there has been virtually no reflective research on what theatre…

This brief reviews results of an Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored project that challenged local data intermediaries in eight cities (all partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, NNIP) to use their data to promote strengthening of their local school readiness systems. The project showed it was possible to develop rich…

Damage to the brain or nervous system at an early developmental stage creates lifelong challenges for the individual. To examine one source of harm to the developing nervous system, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment's (CHE) Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative (LDDI) (Collaborative on Health and the Environment, 2009)…

Objective: Although clinical studies have demonstrated smaller subcortical volumes in structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus, caudate nucleus, and thalamus in adults and adolescents with depressive disorders and anxiety, no study has assessed such structures in babies, long before the development of the disorders. This study examined whether…

Study aim: To compare two exercise training modes on the physical fitness of 10 year-old children. Material and methods: A sample of 60 schoolboys aged 10 years were randomly divided into 3 groups: Traditional (TG), trained according to the Brazilian national curricular parameters, Maturational (MG), in which the degree of difficulty of the…

In the art educational therapy (AET) method introduced in this article, school coursework is integrated into art therapy with the aim of facilitating such learning and enhancing the emotional well-being of children with learning difficulties who have experienced stress or trauma. A grounded theory research study based on the cases of 5 middle…

The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory…

While there is evidence for an association between the development of reading and arithmetic, the precise locus of this relationship remains to be determined. Findings from cognitive neuroscience research that point to shared neural correlates for phonological processing and arithmetic as well as recent behavioral evidence led to the present…

This study investigated gender differences in North American preschoolers' biological reasoning about the concept of "life". Four-year-olds (M = 4.6, SD = 3.3 months) and five-year-olds (M = 5.6, SD = 3.8 months) were asked about the function of 13 body parts, organs, and bodily processes. Results indicated that the likelihood of…