The recent attention being given to early childhood trauma and its negative effects on long-term learning and development has led many policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to focus on developing practices that support children and families who are experiencing trauma. Given the fact that many young children spend a significant amount of…

Executive functions (EFs) involve a number of interconnected systems that, when compromised, can result in difficulties that affect a child's ability to perform tasks across early childhood settings, including the home and community-based settings. In retrospective research studies, researchers have found that a young child's…

The family-centered medical home describes an approach to providing comprehensive primary care. Research advances in developmental neuroscience, genetics, and epigenetics offer a framework for understanding the dynamic process of brain development. It is this process that sets the life-course trajectory for an individual; in turn, a child's…

An authority on neuroscience (the study of the structure and functioning of the brain) and human relationships, Daniel Siegel (2001) begins his classic work, "The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are," with a basic concept: the brain is an open system that physically changes throughout life in response to…

A very common cause of children's behavior disorder disturbance is an entity described as the hyperkinetic impulse disorder. This is characterized by hyperactivity, short attention span and poor powers of concentration, irritability, impulsiveness, variability, and poor schoolwork. The existence of this complexity may lead to many psychological…

This article describes a parallel and distributed processing model (PDPM) of joint attention, self-referenced processing and autism. According to this model, autism involves early impairments in the capacity for rapid, integrated processing of self-referenced (proprioceptive and interoceptive) and other-referenced (exteroceptive) information.…

The authors examine the effects of poverty-related adversity on child development, drawing upon psychobiological principles of experiential canalization and the biological embedding of experience. They integrate findings from research on stress physiology, neurocognitive function, and self-regulation to consider adaptive processes in response to…

The primary purpose of Del Giacco's Neuro-Art Therapy is to help the client regenerate the sensory system at a decoding/encoding (for our purposes we use the two words interchangeably) levels in the brain while using developmental visual spatial exercises or the Therapeutic Drawing Series (TDS). The specialty of Del Giacco Neuro Art Therapy (DAT)…

Many children and youth have difficulty controlling emotions and impulsive behavior. Brain science is shining new light on the process by which children develop self-regulation and controls from within. This article expands upon Fritz Redl and David Wineman's pioneering work aiding children in the development of flexible and effective controls…

Research over the past several decades has provided insight into the processes that govern early brain development and how those processes contribute to behavior. In this article, the authors provide an overview of early brain development beginning with a summary of the prenatal period. They then turn to postnatal development and examine how brain…

This article addresses how kinesiological research on children should advance. Using the study of motor development as a backdrop, the article is divided into three sections. The first section relates the four fundamental questions in motor development that have been asked throughout its history. The second section describes four areas of…

Immordino-Yang's description of the unexpected recovery of 2 boys with severe brain trauma is an example of the interplay between the plasticity of the brain and the plasticity of the context. It highlights the dynamics of "wants and cans" and the specific role of motivation in this dynamic. As an example of how this dynamic can evolve in…

Decades of studies show that children's behavior is shaped by relationships in the "social ecology" of family, peers, school, and community. But in recent decades the prevailing scientific dogma was that genes determine destiny. Now it is clear that experience changes genes. For better or worse, environmental experiences including nutrition,…

Most adults are challenged when it comes to understanding teens' motives. "What were they thinking of?" is an all-too-common response. Without a doubt, no developmental period in life is more confounding and baffling than adolescence. Until recently, erratic teen behavior was blamed on raging hormones, but scientific research in the last decade…

The Child Development & Behavior (CDB) Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) seeks to improve the health and well-being of individuals from infancy through early adulthood by supporting research into healthy growth and development, including all aspects of child development. The study of typical child…