Children's right to participate in all matters and decisions affecting them has gained recognition in society. Its promotion is recommended from an early age -- namely, in early childhood education settings -- and it is described as benefiting children, adults and the community in general. Given the complex and polysemic meaning of participation,…

In the United States, most mothers work during pregnancy. Yet, until the passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act in 2022, pregnant employees did not have a right to reasonable accommodations to work under safe conditions. This law is expected to increase employment among pregnant women, making it critical to understand the effects of work…

In 1951, when Maria Montessori described the pattern of human development as the Constructive Rhythm of Life, marking each of four chapters or planes of development with an inverted triangle, she colored the first and third planes red to represent their intensity (Grazzini, 1996). These two red triangles are referred to as creative periods and…

Personal experience, common sense, and science all confirm that temperatures are rising across the United States and around the world. Record-setting heat waves are occurring with greater frequency and lasting longer than ever before. This working paper is the first in a series focusing on the ways that environmental conditions shape young…

Solitude occurs from childhood to old age. In this special issue introduction, we offer a lifespan perspective on matters of solitude with the aim to point to pertinent issues in the field. We propose that solitude serves important functions that may vary across different times in life and that solitude needs to be considered in the context in…

Research on African American youth's emotional development provides an incomplete understanding of the cultural influences that shape emotion-related skills such as emotion expression, regulation, and understanding. In this article, I propose the multiple cultural frameworks of triple quandary theory to characterize the nature of mainstream…

Grounded in the sociocultural perspective, this paper analyses current Croatian theory and practice on the transition to school and addresses the importance of fostering a play-based pedagogy and symbolic play in particular. Despite the contemporary theoretical background on early childhood and children's transition to school, the mainstream…

Although a growing literature has linked extreme psychosocial adversity in early development to brain structure and function, recent studies highlight that differences in socioeconomic resources may also affect brain development. In this article, we describe research linking variation in neighborhood context and parenting practices, two contexts…

Modern developmental science is informed by several shared principles and adopts a lifespan approach that goes from infancy to senescence. Increasingly, disciplines outside psychology are adopting research frameworks (e.g., fetal origins, developmental origins of health and disease, first 1000 days) that prioritize prenatal experience as a driver…

Participants in longitudinal studies that followed children into adulthood now have children of their own, which has enabled researchers to establish multiple-generation cohorts. In this article, I illustrate the benefits of multiple-generation cohort studies for developmental researchers, including: (a) the impact of child and adolescent…

High-quality language interactions not only support children's language development, but also promote better long-term academic outcomes. Language learning is the single best predictor of later growth in language, literacy, mathematics, and social development. However, many families do not have access to educationally enriched spaces that spur…

In this article, we engage with a question that has occupied the professional, policy, and popular discourse on education and socialization: are a child's development potential and outcomes contingent on innate abilities ("nature") or environment ("nurture") (Plomin, DeFries, & Fulker, 1988; Stiles, 2011; Tabery, 2014;…

Child development science has not fully realized its mission to improve population outcomes for children and eliminate disparities across race and income groups. One domain with great need but also great potential is the challenge parents face in raising a young child. A system of universal primary psychosocial care is proposed, with three…

The National Association for the Education of Young Children recently revised its Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), the standard for early childhood care and education. Josh Thompson and Zlata Stankovic-Ramirez explore how DAP has evolved over time and what guidance it provides early childhood educators regarding the interaction between…

Recent genetic discoveries offer a new lens through which to study cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social processes that are foundational to children's development. In this article, we review the latest advances in genomics--genome-wide association studies and the polygenic scores that have come out of them--and discuss how these techniques…