At school entry, girls are rated by teachers as more competent on measures of social skills than boys. It is less clear if this higher rating is stable or grows over time. To address this question, multiple group curve of factors models investigated gender-specific growth trajectories across seven waves of measurement in a large, longitudinal…

This article reports on analyses examining contextual influences on parenting with an ethnically and geographically diverse sample of parents (predominantly mothers) raising 387 children (49% ethnic minority; 51% male) in high-risk communities. Parents and children were followed longitudinally from first through tenth grades. Contextual influences…

The current study examines the social and behavioral development of school-age children with different histories of overweight onset. Eight thousand children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) participated. Three groups of children were identified for analysis: (1) those who were persistently overweight from…

The present longitudinal study employed two distinctive approaches (variable-oriented and person-oriented) to examine low-income children's academic and social functioning across the important transition from pre-k to first grade. Participants included 152 former urban Head Start children. Variable-oriented and person-oriented approaches were…

School readiness assessment is a prominent feature of early childhood education. Because the construct of readiness is multifaceted, we examined children's patterns on multiple indicators previously found to be both theoretically and empirically linked to school readiness: social skill, interactions with parents, problem behavior, and performance…

Social and behavioral problems can interfere with a child's acquisition of age-appropriate skills, which may lead to antisocial behavior in adolescence and adulthood. Thus, determining how best to support positive skills during early childhood is critical. Using data from the first three phases of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth…

In an attempt to devise a methodology for characterizing children's intuitive theories of drug action, 217 children in Grades 1 to 6 were interviewed about how two substances, alcohol and cocaine, cause behavioral changes in their users. Measures tapped both structure (Piagetian complexity of causal reasoning, coherence, and construction of a…