This article features Discovery Children's Centre, one of the highest quality centres in the province of Manitoba, Canada. Discovery Children's Centre believes that children, who may have little or no voice in a democratic society, can be heard if some adult will speak on their behalf. Even as it has grown from 35 to 230 children, quality has…

The normal developmental challenges experienced during early childhood as well as more significant emotional and behavioral problems require that parents and caregivers communicate effectively. The manner in which parents and caregivers communicate with each other about children's behavior can have a significant and lasting impact on children,…

The present investigation examined 8- to 16-year-olds' tendency to lie, the sophistication of their lies, and related cognitive factors. Participants were left alone and asked not to look at the answers to a test, but the majority peeked. The researcher then asked a series of questions to examine whether the participants would lie about their…

In this study, relations between emotional resonance responses to another's distress, emotion regulation, and self-other discrimination were investigated in infants three-, six-, and nine-months-old. We measured the emotional reactions to the pain cry of a peer, along with the ability to regulate emotions and to discriminate between self and other…

This paper describes work with two children, placed for late adoption who have suffered relational trauma. The paper explores the long-term consequences of such trauma, which includes problems with affect regulation, difficulties in generalising from one experience to another and shifts between phantasies of omnipotent control and sudden…

The Child Development Institute, a nonprofit early intervention program in California, conducted a needs assessment which revealed a community that was receiving little support for infants and toddlers. There was virtually no enrollment in Part C early intervention services despite ranking high on environmental risk factors. This article describes…

This study examined the longitudinal association between marital instability and child sleep problems at ages 9 and 18 months in 357 families with a genetically unrelated infant adopted at birth. This design eliminates shared genes as an explanation for similarities between parent and child. Structural equation modeling indicated that T1 marital…

Consecutive retestings of 92 U.S. preschoolers (n = 30), Chinese preschoolers (n = 31), and deaf children (n = 31) examined whether the sequences of development apparent in cross-sectional results with a theory-of-mind scale also appeared in longitudinal assessment. Longitudinal data confirmed that theory-of-mind progressions apparent in…

Imitation requires the imitator to solve the correspondence problem--to translate visual information from modelled action into matching motor output. It has been widely accepted for some 30 years that the correspondence problem is solved by a specialized, innate cognitive mechanism. This is the conclusion of a poverty of the stimulus argument,…

Early post-natal nutrition influences later development, but there are no studies comparing brain function in healthy infants as a function of dietary intake even though the major infant diets differ significantly in nutrient composition. We studied brain responses (event-related potentials; ERPs) to speech sounds for infants who were fed either…

This paper examines the impact of in utero exposure to the Asian influenza pandemic of 1957 upon childhood development. Outcome data are provided by the National Child Development Study (NCDS), a panel study where all members were potentially exposed in the womb. Epidemic effects are identified using geographic variation in a surrogate measure of…

Drawing developmental predictions from dual-process theories is more complex than is commonly realized. Overly simplified predictions drawn from such models may lead to premature rejection of the dual process approach as one of many tools for understanding cognitive development. Misleading predictions can be avoided by paying attention to several…

Three hypotheses have been posited as competing explanations for the comorbidity or co-occurrence of language difficulties and behavioural problems among children: (1) language difficulties confer risk for behaviour problems, (2) behaviour problems confer risk for language difficulties, and (3) shared risk factors account for their co-occurrence.…

This essay reviews recent research about infant attachment, then discusses the implications of this research as they relate to the following specific manifestations of children's spirituality: faith, wonder, relational consciousness, flow (as in a sense of wholeness or unity), and compassion, in the light of other research on children's…

Recent epidemiological evidence suggests that even in the midst of the "terrible twos," frequent/severe oppositional-defiant behaviors (ODBs) are not common among toddlers and hence may be indicative of a significant opposition-defiance problem. The main objective of this study was to obtain a maximum likelihood estimate of the…