Whether high quantities of center-based care cause behavior problems is a controversial question. Studies using covariate adjustment for selection factors have detected relations between center care and behavior problems, but studies with stronger internal validity less often find such evidence. We examined whether within-child changes in hours in…

This large-scale and longitudinal study examines early home support for learning, formal/informal home mathematics activities, and their associations with children's mathematical development between age two and six. Data were collected in Germany between 2012 and 2018, N = 1184 (49% girls, 51% boys), and 15% of children had parents with a…

High sleep quality has been associated with beneficial outcomes across the life span. Intensive longitudinal studies suggest that these beneficial effects can also be observed on a day-to-day level. However, the dynamic interplay between subjective sleep quality and affective well-being in children's daily life has only rarely been investigated.…

The important role of early self-regulation skills has been repeatedly demonstrated in research. However, there is a lack of studies that have simultaneously examined the influence of hot and cool self-regulation skills on school performance and behavior problems in a longitudinal design from preschool to elementary school and controlling…

During typical childhood interactions with screen-media, two features are prominent. First, input is dominated by audio-visual signals and second, these predominately provide children with ready-made images, potentially negating effortful mental imagery construction. We present a two-year longitudinal study on a sample of 109 preschool children.…

Although it is known from epidemiological research that girls are more likely to develop internalizing disorders and boys are more likely to develop externalizing disorders, differences between girls and boys are rarely examined in risk research. This longitudinal study of 356 families identified risk factors for the development of externalizing…

The development of preschoolers' language skills is influenced by literacy environments and individual differences in storybook exposure. Extant research is limited as most studies (a) investigate the effects on lower level language (LLL; e.g., vocabulary, grammar), but not the effects on higher level language (HLL; e.g., comprehension monitoring,…

Deficits in language skills are a risk factor for later aggressive behaviour. However, previous research has mainly addressed clinical or high-risk samples and relations between language and aggressive behaviour in preschoolers and children in primary school. Based on a German longitudinal project with N = 547 typically developing children, the…

Home literacy environment (HLE) makes an important contribution to children's reading acquisition in early years. Even though some research on children's perception exists, children's reports about HLE have been neglected. The present study focuses on N = 281 six-year-old's reports about HLE and its influences on literacy enjoyment, frequency, and…

The present study examines the impact of family risk factors (e.g., migration background, poverty) in early childhood on children's numeracy skills during preschool in Germany, and if these relations are mediated through the quality of the home learning environment. The data used for this research were collected using the longitudinal study…

Unmet mental health needs are common in young children. Recent research on mental health care utilization has focussed mainly on parental perspectives. This study seeks to determine which types of behaviours exhibited by children predict the perceived need for action among both parents and daycare teachers. Parents and daycare teachers reported on…

The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support children's competency development. In this study, we used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analyses to compare two theoretical dimensions and three methods for assessing the HLE and their associations with linguistic and mathematical competencies of…

In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German, and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in…

Parental conflict is a well-established predictor of child maladjustment. Most research, however, has not considered how the couple's positivity-negativity interaction ratio (i.e., the ability to compensate for negative behaviors with positive) may be linked with child adjustment. We examined interparental positivity-negativity interaction ratios…

The experiment analyzed reactions of 115 first- to fourth-graders after realizing that they performed worse than they expected in a computer game. Based on the VIOLEX model of expectation violation, we assessed immunization against achievement feedback, assimilation (striving to increase performance), and accommodation (willingness for expectation…