Zimbabwe, like most of Sub-Saharan Africa, has been hard-hit by HIV/ AIDS. National estimates reported by the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare put the prevalence rates of HIV in the age group between 15 and 49 at 15.3% (World Health Organization [WHO], UNICEF, & UNAIDS, 2008). This is one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the…

Many people fear that play-fighting or rough and tumble play is the same as real fighting. There is also a fear that this rough play will become real fighting if allowed to continue. Most of all, parents and teachers fear that during the course of rough and tumble play a child may be hurt. To provide for and allow children to play rough without…

In simple tests of preference, infants as young as newborns prefer faces and face-like stimuli over distractors. Little is known, however, about the development of attention to faces in complex scenes. We recorded eye-movements of 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old infants and adults during free-viewing of clips from "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (an animated…

This article is based on an ethnographic study of children's everyday life in Swedish preschools. The ethnography is used to explore children's strategies for influencing, defending and constructing the social order of a preschool institution. The focus of our concern is on how the children, in their interactions with each other and with the…

This paper examines the tie between knowledge and behavior in a noun generalization context. An experiment directly comparing noun generalizations of children at the same point in development in forced-choice and yes/no tasks reveals task-specific differences in the way children's knowledge of nominal categories is brought to bear in a moment. To…

During two decades of observing and leading middle school choral rehearsals, the author has observed that teachers frequently repeat exactly the warm-ups they present to their young adolescent choirs at every rehearsal. If teachers know one thing about middle school students, they know that they are constantly changing--physically, intellectually,…

Two aspects of children's early gender development--the spontaneous production of gender labels and gender-typed play--were examined longitudinally in a sample of 82 children. Survival analysis, a statistical technique well suited to questions involving developmental transitions, was used to investigate the timing of the onset of children's gender…

Infant sleep is a major source of concern for many parents. The aims of this longitudinal study were to assess: (a) the development of sleep patterns among infants, (b) the development of maternal cognitions regarding infant sleep, and (c) the relations between these domains during the 1st year of life. Eighty-five mothers were recruited during…

According to Piaget, 5- or 6-year-old children gradually acquire the concept of time based on events (Piaget, 1969). In his experiment of investigating children's time concepts, Piaget found that children of these ages were able to place pictures based on sequential events with some errors; the younger children made more errors. The National…

Great strides have been made in the development of skills and procedures to aid children with developmental disabilities to establish maximum independence and quality of life. Paramount among the treatment methods that have empirical support are treatments based on applied behavior analysis. These methods are often very labor intensive. Thus,…

Young children show significant changes in their mental-state understanding as marked by their performance on false-belief tasks. This study provides evidence for activity in the prefrontal cortex associated with the development of this ability. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as adults (N = 24) and 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old…

Previous studies show that preschool children view negative emotions as susceptible to intentional control. However, the extent of this understanding and links with child social-emotional adjustment are poorly understood. To examine this, 62 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with puppet scenarios in which characters experienced anger, sadness, and…

Across several measures, the interracial and intra-racial views of 7- and 9-year-old African-American children were examined. Overall, children showed more negative views toward other African-Americans, labeling pictures of African-American children with more negative adjectives than pictures of European-American children. Children displayed more…

Traditionally, we think of play as children's work, and this work is often considered trivial and meaningless. However, when the definition of play is explored, its multiple meanings encourage us to understand play as an important vehicle for the propulsion of society. Play has become a hot topic in households and classrooms and for political…

Each year, the Foundation for Child Development and the Child and Youth Well-Being Index Project at Duke University issue a comprehensive measure of how children are faring in the United States. The Overall Composite Child Well-Being Index (CWI) is based on a composite of 28 "Key Indicators" of well-being that are grouped into seven…