Consistent evidence points to the importance of the early childhood home environment for children's concurrent and subsequent development. Yet little is known about the long-term association between parental warmth in early childhood and children's social-emotional well-being in late childhood for children with and without disabilities. To explore…

The present study investigated child depression symptoms, social skills, and mother-child conflict from mid-childhood to mid-adolescence. Bidirectional effects involving all three constructs were anticipated, as were differential effects for child gender. Participants included 893 families from the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development…

Purpose: Social skills difficulties among children on the autism spectrum can impede social, emotional, and academic development, especially with increasing age and social demands. This pilot study examined the efficacy of a 5-week skill-building program for children on the autism spectrum. Although effective social skills programs are available…

Parental reflective functioning (PRF) is considered to be a key factor in the development of emotion regulation in children, which in turn plays an important role in their psychosocial functioning. This study aimed to explore the mediating role of children's emotion regulation in the relationship between parental reflective functioning and…

Though considerable research links both a lack of self-control and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to a variety of negative health and behavioral outcomes, few studies to date have explored whether ACEs are associated with deficits in self-control. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCW; n = 3,444) and a life…

Research Findings: Traditional peer sociometric nominations, even at early ages, are not replaceable by teachers' classifications of children's sociometric popularity. The association between reports from the two sources, although not independent, was weak, with teachers perceiving more children as popular and fewer children as rejected. Teacher…

Objective: This study investigated the role of cognitive flexibility and temperament as predictors of academic performance, in children in care and children from a community sample, longitudinally. Also, it examined the mediating role of child's temperament in the relationship between cognitive flexibility and academic performance, as well as…

Purpose: Reported ear and hearing difficulties (rEHD) are known to be associated with reading difficulties as well as mental health problems. In this study, we aim to examine the relationship between reading and mental health in children with rEHD. Method: In this study, we used structural equation modeling to measure the strength of longitudinal…

The purpose of the study was to characterize the relationships between behavior problems, academic achievement, and loneliness of students in the upper and lower thirds of a social skills classification. Participants were 733 students (359 boys and 374 girls) ages 9 to 14 years, 642 without learning disabilities (LDs) and 91 with LDs. Their…

Research Findings: Very little research has examined whether the contributions of Head Start's Family Service Workers (FSWs) and family partnership services influence family and child outcomes. Using data from 215 families in the 2014 Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), this study used structural equation models to examine…

The study explored the validity of the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS) in a sample of over 4,000 preschool children (aged 3--5 years old) in China. Multiple approaches were used to examine the validity of SSIS-RS in the Chinese cultural context, including confirmatory factor analysis, convergent and discriminant validity…

Despite widespread interest in the construct of executive functioning (EF), we currently lack definitive evidence regarding the best measurement model for representing the construct in substantive analyses. The most common practice is to represent EF ability as a reflective latent variable, with child performance on individual EF tasks as observed…

The purpose of the study was to explore whether gender or ethnicity moderated the links between language skills and teacher ratings of problem behaviour and between language and social skills in 386 English-speaking Hispanic and European American preschool children from low-income families. The "Preschool Language Scale-4" was…

Poorer language ability has been shown to predict the development of externalizing behavior problems such as aggression and conduct problems. However, the developmental process that links poorer language ability to externalizing problems is unclear. The present study examined (a) whether within-child changes in language ability predict…

The interrelationships between math and behavioral skill development prior to school entry are not well understood, yet have important implications for understanding how to best prepare young children for kindergarten. This study addresses this gap by utilizing a sample of 1,750 children (53% male; 47% White, 16% Black, 16% Hispanic, 8% Asian, and…