Early childhood educators are likely to encounter youngsters who experience problems at home impeding their abilities to learn and benefit from the program. One such group is children who live or have lived with adult domestic violence. Children yet to begin elementary school are over-represented among groups of young people known to live with…

Psychological well-being is the ultimate "quality of life" measure. The presence of a neurosensory disorder (NSD) in a child, such as ADD, ADHD, Asperger's syndrome, or autism, can rob the child of psychological well-being, or hamper the growth of well-being as the child develops. Fortunately, treatment of NSDs can remove obstacles to the…

Data are reported from 3 groups of children residing in Bucharest, Romania. Face recognition in currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized, and never-institutionalized children was assessed at 3 time points: preintervention (n = 121), 30 months of age (n = 99), and 42 months of age (n = 77). Children watched photographs of caregiver…

It was hypothesized that combined individual child vulnerability (anxious solitude) and interpersonal stress (peer exclusion) would predict the strongest responses to experimentally manipulated behavioral peer rejection. Results indicated that in a sample of 3rd graders (N = 160, 59% girls), anxious solitary excluded children displayed more…

Research Findings: The toddler stage is a unique developmental period of early childhood. During this stage, children are developing autonomy, self-regulation, and language capabilities through interactions with significant adults in their lives. Increasing numbers of toddlers are being enrolled in child care. This article focuses on the need to…

Objective: Increased behavior problems have been reported in offspring of mothers with depression. In-home observations link maternal depressive symptoms (MDS) and mother-child interaction patterns with toddler behavior problems and examine their persistence into late childhood. Method: Maternal characteristics (N = 153) and behaviors of…

Cultures differ with respect to parenting strategies already during infancy. Distal parenting, i.e., face-to-face context and object stimulation, is prevalent in urban educated middle-class families of Western cultures; proximal parenting, i.e., body contact and body stimulation, is prevalent in rural, low-educated farmer families. Parents from…

The present study investigated the associations of Korean mothers' attention regulation and referential speech during play with their toddlers' language and play development. The play interaction between mothers (n = 42) and their toddlers aged between 13 and 23 months was videotaped during home visits. Maternal behavior in regulating their…

Upper elementary children today, while retaining many of the characteristics ascribed to them generations ago by theorists such as Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, are different. Developmental characteristics across multiple domains remain relatively predictable for the upper elementary years, but they also reflect changes in society and school…

Much contemporary research has demonstrated the multiple ways that sleep is important for child and adolescent development. This article reviews that research with an emphasis on how sleep parameters are related to school adjustment and achievement. Five areas of sleep research are reviewed to discern implications for practice with children using…

The purposes of this study were to clarify how social problem-solving processes develop and to identify developmentally-sensitive intervention components for children's aggression. Elementary and junior-high school Japanese students (N = 1100) from urban public schools participated in the present investigation. Their alternative thinking skills,…

This paper analyzes the effect of participation in the School Breakfast Program (SBP) on breakfast consumption using time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Participation effects are identified by comparing differences in breakfast patterns between weekdays (when children are in school) and…

Contrary to popular hypothesis, recent research rejects the notion that most or even many children and youth are over-scheduled and are suffering as a result. In fact, less than one in ten could be described as over-scheduled. Moreover, research indicates that only six in ten children and youth participate in organized out-of-school activities at…

The present study utilized a short-term longitudinal research design to examine the hypothesis that shyness in preschoolers is differentially related to different aspects of emotion processing. Using teacher reports of shyness and performance measures of emotion processing, including (1) facial emotion recognition, (2) non-facial emotion…

This article reviews the current status and a future agenda for childhood career development theory, research, and practice. The fragmented nature of the current state of the literature is noted, and a call is made for a reexamination and reconsideration of the childhood developmental pathways of life's work. It is suggested that the study of…