Learn how to create and nurture communities of care for diverse children, families, and practitioners through responsive practice. In this text, the social and emotional worlds of babies and toddlers, their peers, and their caregivers come to life in the everyday moments of infant-toddler care and education. The authors show infants and toddlers…

This article describes the experiences of frequently-traveling parents Balick and Jepson, and their 2-year daughter Coco. As owners of two businesses (an event-planning business and a Montessori aterials company) the travel between 7 days and 3 months at a time--for trade shows, conferences, school visits, and working events. How does one manage…

In the first years of life, as children observe, imitate, and interact with people and their environment, the brain is structuring a foundation for vocabulary, values, cognitive processes, and social skills. Educators, you can help influence that development by teaching the skills and dispositions of intelligent, creative, effective decision…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

Empathy in college-age students is decreasing at unprecedented rates. Understanding empathy in children can act as primary prevention in tackling the problem. This study considers laugh tracks' capacity to bias reality, foster empathy, and investigate differences across time and gender in 181 fifth grade students. Findings from this…

Why is play important in the lives of children? What crucial aspects of learning are being neglected in the current near-elimination of recess time in public schools? "Playing for Keeps", co-authored by the well-known writer and educational leader Deborah Meier, and two colleagues with equally long experience in schools, explores these…

This was a two-phase qualitative study that investigated the humorous aspects of humorous photographs young children took in their school and home environment, which were examined in the context of the theory of the absurd and the empowerment theory. The participants in the study were six children--three boys and three girls--between the ages of…

The researchers studied humour among Chinese and Greek preschool children in relation to cognitive development. The sample included 55 Chinese children and 50 Greek children ages 4½ to 5½ years. Results showed that both Chinese and Greek children's humour recognition were significantly and positively correlated to their cognitive development, but…

Two experiments examined pictorial humor as an unusual but legitimate way to approach the study of children's representational activity and the transition from implicit to explicit knowledge. In both experiments, the participants were 3- and 4-year-old children. Experiment 1 studied the understanding of two pictorial jokes using two conditions,…

This is a down-to-earth, heart-to-heart book about what it takes to be an exceptional early childhood teacher. The author uses her experience as a classroom observer and a developmental psychologist to create a rationale for best practice--the reasoning behind the best (worst and average) classroom practice. Cindy Rzasa Bess examines a variety of…

Children employ different types of humor as they explore, interpret, and negotiate their environments. Whereas an appreciation of verbal incongruity has been a hallmark of older preschooler humor (e.g., McGhee, 1989), more recently, other violations of expectations and clowning also have been identified as ubiquitous during the first two years of…

The assumptions about children's development are challenged by recent research findings that show learning begins at an earlier age and proceeds at a different pace than expected. Sometimes researchers find that they have misunderstood children's cognitive, social, and physical development due to errors in measurement (faulty tests or tools),…

We investigated humor as a context for learning about abstraction and disbelief. More specifically, we investigated how parents support humor understanding during book sharing with their toddlers. In Study 1, a corpus analysis revealed that in books aimed at 1- to 2-year-olds, humor is found more often than other forms of doing the wrong thing…

The author offers the thesis that hunter-gatherers promoted, through cultural means, the playful side of their human nature and this made possible their egalitarian, nonautocratic, intensely cooperative ways of living. Hunter-gatherer bands, with their fluid membership, are likened to social-play groups, which people could freely join or leave.…

Humor is a highly regarded attribute and often forms the basis of childhood friendships. As much humor is visual, children with visual impairment are particularly vulnerable to missing out on this type of development. Recent research indicates that children can be taught to develop their sense of humor. Therefore, children with visual impairment…