115, 6-9-year-olds (M age = 7.47 years) participated in a scripted event during which the child's mother or a stranger broke a forbidden puppet and requested secrecy. Then, children were either (1) primed for the goal of honesty (prime), (2) asked to promise to tell the truth (oath), or (3) given no instructions (control) before responding to…

This study investigated whether transitory and persistent poverty spells were associated with children's learning (literacy and numeracy scores) and executive function outcomes in Ghana. Children resided in the Greater Accra region (N = 2,154; 49% female; M[subscript age] = 5.2 years at wave-1) and were followed at four-time points over three…

Gratitude has been previously defined as a tendency to appreciate positives in life, thus conflating gratitude and components of well-being. Accordingly, current measures assessing "gratitude" are primarily based on this conflated conceptualization, and do not adequately assess gratitude as a moral virtue. The Gratitude Assessment…

Stories are widely used around the world to try to teach children moral lessons. However, it is often difficult for children to figure out how lessons from stories can be applied to real-life settings. In the present research, we tested whether encouraging children to be like the protagonists helps explain the success of positive moral stories…

Although children display strong individual differences in emotion expression, they also engage in emotional synchrony or reciprocity with interaction partners. To understand this paradox between trait-like and dyadic influences, the goal of the current study was to investigate children's emotion expression using a Social Relations Model (SRM)…

Play during childhood is essential to growth and learning. Little is known about whether categories of toys moderate play behaviors at different ages, or how children interact with toys that are simple, appropriate, or complex for their developmental level. Two hundred and forty-three children between the ages of 1 and 8 years, divided into four…

Emotion regulation is one of the important skills helping children and parents to deal with stressful conditions within the family context during the pandemic. We aimed to investigate whether mothers' emotion regulation strategies before COVID-19 and their COVID-19-related anxiety would predict children's sadness regulation during the pandemic…

The need for a new measure of social-emotional wellbeing for children 6--12 years emerged in our collaboration with schools and community agencies in a disadvantaged region of Brisbane, Australia. Our search for an age-appropriate medium led us to develop "Clowning Around", a computer game generating data which was assessed for validity…

Parent-child engagement in constrained (e.g., learning alphabet letters or sounds) and unconstrained (e.g., storytelling, defining words) literacy activities are central components of the home literacy environment. Unconstrained activities are particularly important for children's oral language and support school readiness. Yet, many parents do…

Research in developed countries has found that paternal involvement has positive and significant effects on early childhood development (ECD). Less is known, however, about the state of paternal involvement and its influence on ECD in rural China. Using data collected in Southern China that included 1,460 children aged 6-42 months and their…

This study aimed to examine the unique and joint contributions of behavioral and emotional self-regulation to key but understudied emergent literacy and early social skills, disentangling sex-differentiated paths. The participants were 231 Portuguese preschoolers (50% boys; M[subscript age] = 59.5 months; SD = 8.5) enrolled in 47 classrooms. In…

We present results of a randomized control trial of a two-generation English as a Second Language (ESL) program in which all families participated in Head Start while treatment parents also enrolled in a high dosage, family-focused ESL curriculum with supportive services. Examining 197 parent-child dyads among Spanish- (89%) and Zomi-speaking…

Can early childhood education (ECE) support the societal language development of children from linguistically diverse backgrounds? This study examined how existing variation in classroom interaction quality (CLASS Pre-K), classroom composition (percentages of children from low-income backgrounds and dual language learners [DLLs]), and duration of…