Much has been written in recent years about early childhood play, documenting its role in healthy development, detailing the risks children face if they do not have access to play, and offering implementation tips to educators to use in communicating about play to administrators and parents. For those ready to move forward in their own communities…

The recent announcement that Randolph-Macon Woman's College will admit male students has triggered yet another round in the continuing debate over women's colleges. At Randolph-Macon itself, the news was met with the usual mix of public displays: As students and alumnae protested with signs reading "Coed is a four-letter word," administrators and…

There are increasing demands in schools to provide social-emotional learning opportunities for students. This article reports on the utility of a universal coping skills program for young people at risk for depression in a rural context. The study deals specifically with the utility of the Best of Coping (BOC) program implemented to all students…

Child development theorists, researchers, and educators have long known that play is one of children's most valuable resources, vital to their social, emotional, and cognitive growth. Through play children make sense of the world around them and work through new experiences, ideas, and feelings. But in recent years, a host of social forces and…

Although childhood death from health-related disorders has decreased dramatically in the United States due largely to advances in medical technology, it is an unfortunate fact of life that children can and do die from medical and health-related problems. A possible role for school psychologists in dealing with this situation is providing direct…

The Foundation for Child Development Child and Youth Well-Being Index Project at Duke University issues an annual comprehensive measure of how children are faring in the United States. The Child Well-Being Index (CWI) is based on a composite of 28 "Key Indicators" of wellbeing that are grouped into seven "Quality-of-Life/Well-Being…

Background/Context: Teaching, leading, and learning are inextricably connected to emotions. Yet, the significance of emotions is rarely addressed in educational settings, and when it is, the relationship between emotions and curricula is most often framed by of an overly individualistic behavior model that focuses on the management and regulation…

This study explores educators' reflections on professional childcare practice in different national contexts. The data were collected by showing video clips of classroom activities in Japanese, Dutch and German pre-schools to experienced German and Dutch pre-school teachers. The clips were used to elicit their opinions on playing and learning in…

This study documents the home literacy experiences of children born with very low birth weight (VLBW). The study's design was modelled after Purcell-Gates' study of social domains mediated by print as home literacy experiences. A design combining purposeful sampling, semi-structured data collection and descriptive case study analysis was employed…

Two studies used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine neural manifestations of emotion recognition in 7-month-old infants. In the first study, 20 infants were presented with 2 alternating achromatic slides of the same female model posing a happy and a fearful expression. Infants' ERPs revealed a prominent positive component to the happy face…

The concept of limits on child and teenage behavior is discussed in this book. Section I includes the core hypothesis of the theory of limits and discusses these essential concepts: (1) the pleasure/pain principle (the need to increase tolerance for stimulation in the pain center of the brain in order to be able to tolerate more stimulation in the…

Two studies looked into the ability of 3- to 5-year-olds to understand the idea that a person who intends to bring about a bad outcome will be pleased when he does so. Previous studies had conflicting outcomes; one found children under age 7 did not understand the idea, while another found that most 5-year-olds did. The first of the two studies…

The Knox-Sporakowski Attitudes Towards Love scale was subjected to factor analysis. Principal component analysis indicated unidimensionality of the scale. Additional analyses suggested the possibility of three subscales. Labels for the subscales were assigned. Suggestions for further research with the scale were made. (Author)

This study investigated the development of perceptual, cognitive, and affective perspective taking in 167 kindergarten through sixth grade children. Task intercorrelations were low, nonsignificant, and inconsistent, supporting the view that perspective taking is a multidimensional social-cognitive construct. (JMB)

This article discusses helping children cope with death. It also presents some of the issues related to the way our society deals with the topic and the reality of death. (Author)