In this essay, Robert Davis argues that much of the moral anxiety currently surrounding children in Europe and North America emerges at ages and stages curiously familiar from traditional Western constructions of childhood. The symbolism of infancy has proven enduringly effective over the last two centuries in associating the earliest years of…

It has come to be generally accepted that the psychopathological effects of psychosocial stress and adversity are diagnostically nonspecific. There is a good deal of supporting evidence in support of this assumption, even though it may be that the nonspecificity has been exaggerated through a failure to take account of comorbidity. This chapter…

Economists are only beginning to understand the relationship between personality traits and economic outcomes. This paper examines the influence of childhood social maladjustment on cognitive development, labor market earnings and career progression using longitudinal data drawn from the National Child Development Study. Net of differences in…

We study the impact of maternal care on early child development using an expansion in Canadian maternity leave entitlements. Following the leave expansion, mothers who took leave spent 48-58 percent more time not working in their children's first year of life. This extra maternal care primarily crowded out home-based care by unlicensed…

To explore whether punitive parenting styles contribute to early-acquired emotion knowledge deficits observable in neglected children, we observed 42 preschool children's emotion knowledge, expression recognition time, and IQ. The children's mothers completed the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scales to assess the recent use of three types of…

For infants and toddlers demonstrating feeding problems, it is critical to find the basis for the problems to create more pleasurable mealtimes for the child, his or her family members, and caregivers. Feeding difficulties can affect general health, developmental gains, and emotional well-being. Understanding the cause of feeding problems and…

Society today is inundated by a multitude of messages regarding the risks and dangers that affect youngsters, with media constantly talking about "cotton wool" kids (see Furedi, 1997, 2001, 2006) and an "obesity epidemic" (see Wright and Harwood, 2009). A social panic has been created by the media, which ignores the positive…

In recent years, playful methods of learning have almost disappeared from school classrooms, and active, creative, extended playtimes during recess, at home, and in neighborhoods have also greatly diminished. This disappearance of play is especially unfortunate because it is happening at the very time that professionals in many scientific,…

Penny Wilson is a playworker--one of a group of professionals who facilitate children's play in adventure playgrounds, parks, and other settings, principally in the United Kingdom. Wilson grew up in the Southeast of England and spent much of her childhood playing on the coast near her family home. She studied illustration in art school, settled in…

Stuart L. Brown is founder of the National Institute for Play, a California-based, not-for-profit organization dedicated to the notion that play can help transform the lives of individuals, families, schools, and organizations. Trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry, and clinical research, Brown was a physician in the United States…

This is a down-to-earth, heart-to-heart book about what it takes to be an exceptional early childhood teacher. The author uses her experience as a classroom observer and a developmental psychologist to create a rationale for best practice--the reasoning behind the best (worst and average) classroom practice. Cindy Rzasa Bess examines a variety of…

Self-regulatory limitations are typical of young children, whose impulsiveness, distractibility, and emotional outbursts can amuse and frustrate parents and practitioners. During the last 30 years, however, research into the development of self-regulation has revealed that early childhood is a very early stage in the maturation of brain regions…

Positive father involvement and investment in the early years is of importance for children's later emotional, cognitive and social well-being. This article critically examines the multiple motivations and barriers experienced by the growing number of father primary carers. The small-scale research study presented suggests that for a…

The theoretical construction in this article rests on one constitutive pillar of seeing the toddler within the view of Merleau-Pontyan philosophy, combined with a second pillar of empirical toddler peer studies, from both of which an emerging toddler "style" of socializing is read. "Style" in this analytical context should be viewed as a…

While significant attention has been paid to Wall Street investors and families impacted by the current subprime mortgage crisis in the USA, the lives of Sesame Street are minimally discussed. Children and their families are enduring a variety of consequences of foreclosures. The consequences can be hugely disruptive to the approximately 2 million…