Focused on early childhood development, this "UNICEF Intercom" asserts that developmental programs should aim to give children a fair chance at growth beyond survival. First presented are moral, scientific, social equity, economic, population, and programatic arguments for looking beyond the fundamental objective of saving young lives.…

More women have entered the job market than ever before. With the current socioeconomic changes and with more women attaining education, the number of working women is going to increase rapidly. Most of the working women are of childbearing age and have both preschool and school-age children. While women have to work, it is becoming rather…

A Parent Education Program was initiated in Chicago in fall 1981 to promote parental interest and involvement in their own and their children's education. The program's rationale, which is supported by studies of parent behavior and child development, is that involved parents will have a positive impact on their children's educational and personal…

Conflicting results have been obtained from studies examining childrearing attitudes, knowledge of child development norms, or perceptions of locus of control, and how these variables relate to parental discipline practices and to parent-child relationships. One way to clarify these inconsistent findings in the literature would be to examine the…

The first of a series of four, this booklet is designed to interest and involve 9- to 11-year-olds in learning about human development. "Fun to Grow On" focuses specifically on helping elementary school children share and enjoy some simple activities with preschool children. The activities are intended to teach older children that (1) each person…

The first part of this paper describes three models of child development, each of which recommends an appropriate role to mothers for the proper nurturance of children. It is argued that the Child Survival model, which relegates a mother's role to provision of food and physical care, ignores aspects of psychological development. The…

The seven articles in this annual report concern aspects of attachment, social interaction among parents and children, temperament, affective behavior, and/or research methodology. Aspects of attachment and temperament are addressed in Kazuo Miyake's study of the "Relation of Temperamental Disposition to Classification of Attachment,"…

The Maternal and Infant Health Outreach Worker Program (MIHOW) of Vanderbilt University's Center for Health Services gathered data on family planning, prenatal care, pregnancy outcomes, breastfeeding, and preventive child health care from 60 women in 6 rural, low income communities in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The resulting baseline…

To study the emergence of literacy during the preschool years, a handwritten diary, maintained on a day to day basis, focused on one child, David, from ages two and a half to four and a half. One facet of the study concentrated on his literary language--his incorporation of written texts (children's literature) into his language and background of…

More mothers than ever are now entering the work force and leaving greater numbers of preschool children and infants with less maternal supervision. How this phenomenon affects the development of infants and preschoolers has been the focus of much research, and research results have been mixed. A review of the research related to maternal…

An account by a mother--who was also a children's librarian--of how she explored her young daughter's responses to books, this book describes the effect of books upon the development of children in their early years. Beginning shortly after the child's second birthday, the book relates the mother's and daughter's views about the picture books they…

Although much investigation of adult social support networks has been done, little attention has been paid to children's social support networks. Childhood patterns of social support probably influence adult patterns. A study was conducted to describe the social networks of third through sixth grade children. It also tests the validity of a new…

The major goal of the Educational Television Intervention Programs Project (ETIPS) of Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee, is to develop, field test, and disseminate a supplementary model for early intervention in rural isolated regions. The ETIPS model is based on beliefs that parents can be effective at early intervention…

In order to construct a plan drawing test for emotionally disturbed children, 1,250 children from 6 to 15 years old were asked to draw plans of their houses. Forty items in this cross-sectional sample illustrate a regular and rapid increase with age from the purely vertical pictures of houses at 6 years to the mainly horizontal representations at…

One factor consistently overlooked in the literature of both empirical research and treatment intervention strategies is the role of the father in the development and treatment of childhood disturbances. In declaring the mother-child relationship as the setting within which childhood disturbances occur, researchers assumed that the father was…