Children often encounter events that bear on their moral and other evaluations, such as physical aggression and material disorder. Children's perceptions and evaluations are decisive for how they respond to and learn from these everyday events. Using a new method for investigating the development of social perceptions and evaluations, researchers…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

Forest kindergartens are a new idea in the United States but have been around in Germany, Norway, and other European countries for decades. Forest "kindergartens" are preschools for children ages 3-6 and focus on being outdoors and learning through interacting with nature. Instead of building with blocks or doing puzzles at a table…

Background: Fathers have unique influences on children's development, and particularly in the development of social skills. Although father-child relationship influences on children's social competence have received increased attention in general, research on fathering in families of children with developmental delays (DD) is scant. This study…

Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,312) were analyzed to examine whether the adverse effects of early insensitive parenting on children's academic functioning can be offset by parents' later involvement in children's education. Observations of mothers' early…