This article offers interpretive perspectives on play as a cultural activity during middle childhood by contrasting two communities targeted for aid by external sport and play programs: a Chicago public housing community and a community of Angolan refugee camps. Ethnographic anecdotes, along with some survey results, demonstrate that aside from…

This commentary endorses J. Kagan's (2008) conclusion that many of the most dramatic findings on early perceptual, cognitive, and social competencies are ambiguous. It supports his call for converging research operations to disambiguate findings from single paradigms and single response indices. The commentary also argues that early competencies…

How children are guided in the development of their thinking is now crucial in the twenty-first century. Over the past decades special thinking skills programmes have been developed to enhance thinking but these programmes have so far been unable to produce clear evidence to support their effectiveness. This article argues that due to the complex…

The authors describe how children draw stories, not pictures. They suggest that by encouraging children to draw, and to bring to school drawings that have been done at home, art teachers can help children to create fantastic worlds. (KC)

In this article, the author expresses concern that phonemic awareness is being viewed as a skill that is taught, rather than an ability that children develop as they become literate. Research has found that as children begin to read and write, phonemic awareness and knowledge of phonics develop gradually and simultaneously. In this paper, the…

In this article, the authors discuss the important role of dramatic ("pretend") play in early childhood with increasing emphasis at school on developing academic skills in children at younger and younger ages. Play is especially beneficial to children's learning when it reaches a certain degree of sophistication. In other words, "unproductive"…

Researchers have studied both competence levels and competence motivation in children. Competence motivation is usually assessed in terms of children's spontaneous preferences for optimal cognitive challenge, but actual spontaneous preferences in free play have seldom been used to assess motivation. In fact, competence level and competence…

This article examines how an optimal interpersonal exchange between caregiver and infant occurs, including factors that promote developmental skills, heighten rapport with the caregiver, and elicit optimism about the future. The process of "previewing," in which caregivers make predictions concerning their infants' imminent developmental…

Introduces this special journal issue re-examining the contributions of Myrtle McGraw to developmental psychology in order to clarify misinterpretations of her work and to highlight dimensions that constitute promising lines of inquiry for contemporary researchers. Maintains that McGraw failed to receive credit for her alternative to…

Discusses how McGraw's work broached the notion of a reciprocal relationship between structural maturation and function, thus anticipating the current understanding of the role of experience in the cortical and motor maturation of infants in the first year of postnatal life. Also presents her clear formulation of a flexible critical period concept…

Reexamines McGraw's research and theoretical principles on early neuromotor development, focusing on unaided walking. Notes that contemporary research supports and clarifies her observations providing greater detail about factors involved in the formation of higher-order control, and amplifying the role of experience. Discusses possible mechanisms…

Maintains that McGraw conducted a more complex analysis of neurobehavior than acknowledged by those characterizing her position as maturationist; that she advanced a unique analysis of brain development and consciousness, singling out the reciprocal relationship between neural growth processes and early experience; and that her studies of the role…

Suggests that lags in practitioner development for mental health primary prevention programs are due to the emphasis that practitioner education places on individual treatment rather than on larger ecological systems affecting the individual. Describes core activities of primary prevention and the knowledge, skills, and attributes necessary to…

This article proposes that intuitive behaviors may be used to detect and resolve potential conflict in mother-infant relationships. Previewing, in which the caregiver introduces the infant to the physical sensations and interpersonal meaning of a new developmental skill, is suggested as a way of moving the mother-infant relationship in the…

Some of the ways young children initially approach writing, including their understanding and involvement with the writing process, is the focus of this paper. It illustrates the variety of ways children deal with the concept of spaces between words, the differences between printed and cursive writing, and the left-to-right, top-to-bottom…