Violent crimes and domestic violence are notoriously high in South Africa, which leaves many children defenceless to struggle with emotions such as loneliness and sadness. The healthy development and socialisation of children can be difficult in a society characterised by domestic tribulations, poverty, crime, single-parent homes, and absent…

Nurture Groups (NGs) are a school-based intervention for children who missed out on healthy early attachment experiences and who, as a result, present with marked impairments in social, emotional and behavioural functioning upon school entry. Researchers have consistently found that students are significantly more likely to exhibit improvements in…

Purpose: This paper investigates the interplay between consequences in restorative practices (RP) and the synergies with responsive classroom, particularly in international schools. Addressing critics who deem RP a "soft option", the study defines "restorative consequences" within the RP framework. It analyses literature and…

Narrative Story-Stem Tasks (NSST) assess young children's perceptions of close relationship qualities via the spontaneous narratives they create in response to story beginnings using doll-like figures. Most NSST research to date has focused on family relationships. This study extends this research to children's perceptions of relationships with…

The emotional aspects of children's social relations have generally been marginalised in social science discourse. Children, who participated in the Australian segment of the Children's Understandings of Well-being (CUWB) project used various media to 'voice' the importance for their well-being of emotional relatedness with family, friends,…

Teachers have reported that they have difficulty providing support to traumatized children and youth because of a lack of training in how to identify and respond to the needs of these children. The program, "Amazing Help Skills for Teachers to Unmask Trauma in Children and Youth" (AHSUM), is a trauma-focused training program, designed…

Studies examining the well-being of British children find that about 5-10% are at risk of developing problems. This study aimed to examine the emotional and behavioural development of six to eight year olds in an area of socio-economic deprivation in Glasgow (Scotland) and compare this with UK norms. Furthermore, it aimed to look at overlap…

Traumatic experiences are common in early childhood and may have enduring consequences on health and development. Cost-effective and developmentally appropriate interventions are needed to support the educational success of children affected by trauma. The Supportive Trauma Interventions for Educators (STRIVE) Project emphasized strategies for…

This paper discusses the Boxall Profile as an assessment and intervention framework designed to support disadvantaged children in mainstream schools. The Boxall Profile was developed in the 1970s in the United Kingdom by Marjorie Boxall to identify children who had come into school unprepared to meet the demands of classroom life and needed…

This article presents theoretical arguments and supporting empirical evidence suggesting that attachment experiences in early life may be important in the later development of self-regulation and conscientious behavior. Analyses of data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth…

The focus of this article is on children who are "looked after" or adopted. Specifically it explores some of the possible effects of early life traumas and insecure attachments on brain development and subsequent learning in primary school. The article draws on a range of research which helps to outline possible difficulties which these…

National educational achievement statistics show that academic underachievement is a significant problem for all students in the United States and for culturally diverse students in particular. The relationship of attachment and its interaction with traumatic stress has been proposed as an alternative explanation for the persistent…

Previous research has focused on who the primary attachment figures are for children in middle childhood, but there has been relatively little research on other important people who may fulfill attachment needs. The goal of the study was to identify who children use as non-parental attachment figures and to examine whether children's use varies…

Self-representations of 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-graders' social and academic competence were examined in relation to children's personal (grade/age); family (attachment to parents, marital conflict, anxiety related to conflict); and school (teacher appraisals) contexts. Children who reported higher levels of security of attachment to parents and lower…

To increase our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in internal working models of attachment, this study investigated the relationship between secure attachment and attentional breadth to mother using a dual task design. The content of the cues (mother vs. unfamiliar women) and the duration of the presentation of the cues (34 msec,…