Like many a modern play theorist, both Mark Twain and Walt Disney were enchanted by the way children act out stories, in particular pirate tales. For both Twain and Disney, this fascination grew out of their small-town, midwestern boyhoods, where avid reading and fantasy play helped stave off boredom and fill emotional gaps for both of them. Even…

The author contends that reading some narratives of make-believe can become for many children the ultimate form of fantasy play, providing them with a sense of control absent in their real world. She employs terms from French structuralist critic Gérard Genette, from Austrian child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and from English pediatrician D. W.…

The authors describe the challenges to nurturing reflective practices in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)--an environment in which life and death hang in fragile balance and where the need to defend against unbearable realities is natural, even an adaptive response. Working as consultants to this acute setting, the authors describe how they…

Rachel Carson (1956)--scientist, writer, and environmentalist--states that "A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement". Many people have heard and been inspired by these words, but may not have a clear idea about what wonder really is. This isn't surprising, because wonder in different contexts can mean…

A new measure of sibling conflict was used to identify 2 types of conflicts in 115 adolescent sibling pairs (older siblings, M = 15.59, SD = 2.01 years; younger siblings, M = 13.02, SD = 2.06 years). Conflicts overall were more frequent than intense and more likely to involve the invasion of the personal domain than conflicts involving equality…

From a developmental perspective, it has been reasoned that over the course of development children make differential use of available landmarks in the surroundings to orient in space. The present study examined whether children can learn to apply different spatial strategies, focusing on different landmark cues. Children aged 7 and 10 years were…

By preschool age, children have a sophisticated assumption about the conventional nature of various kinds of information. The present studies investigated the role of two cues in 2- and 3-year-olds' determination of what is conventional, namely the intentionality and intra-individual consistency in the use of objects. Overall, in Study 1, both 2-…

Newborn chicks were tested for their sensitivity to number vs. continuous physical extent of artificial objects they had been reared with soon after hatching. Because of the imprinting process, such objects were treated by chicks as social companions. We found that when the objects were similar, chicks faced with choices between 1 vs. 2 or 2 vs. 3…

Ten years ago children diagnosed as having severe/profound intellectual disabilities were allowed to attend and study in Finnish comprehensive schools. The nationwide intensive developmental work for creating a curriculum for this group of students began earlier, in the 1980s. The aim of this study was to discover what types of models of…

The importance of daily child observation and documentation in early childhood programs has been well established. Observing and documenting children's ongoing learning and development provides rich information about how they view, process, and interact with their world. This information, in turn, guides curricular planning, implementation, and…

This article draws on a study of Australian curriculum shifts between 1975 and 2005 to take up two themes of this special issue: the question about what conceptions of knowledge are now at work; and the consideration of global influences and national specificities in the reformulations of curriculum. It discusses two important approaches to…

To date, much of the research investigating maternal-child discourse has focused on the preschool period of children's development, with little attention paid to how these styles develop. The current study aimed to assess whether maternal elaborative discourse elements seen in preschool are also evident during the toddler years, and whether the…

Assessment systems that track children's progress across time need to be sensitive to the variegated nature of development. Although instruments are commonly designed to assess behaviors within a specific age range, some children advance slower or faster than others and, as a result, often show behaviors from a younger or older age group. This…

The second year of life is marked by pronounced changes in the length of time over which events are remembered. We tested whether the age-related differences are related to differences in memory for the specific features of events. In our study, 16- and 20-month-olds were tested for immediate and long-term recall of individual actions and temporal…

One hundred thirty-three children, average age 9.58 years, were read vignettes describing a moral transgression and then discussed what would constitute a fair punishment. Children's gender influenced conversation dynamics (use of interruption and other simultaneous speech) but not conversation content (justifications for judgments). All children…