Conversations with families about understanding and nurturing their young child's development can be both rewarding and challenging. In this article, two seasoned HealthySteps specialists and two HealthySteps physician champions were asked to reflect on this central aspect of their mission in serving infants, toddlers, and families and on what…

Calls for innovation in education often focus on the need to prepare students for the future. Ensuring that we are supporting their empathy for others is an often overlooked, but critical, aspect of that preparation.

Child education and accompanying discourse in the seventeenth-century circles of Constantijn Huygens are thoroughly researched. But while children grow up, parents also learn and not only through their siblings. Some remarks about experiences that Huygens had outside the regular discourse on education can be made. Huygens' correspondence and his…

Raising and educating children is always about their future. We want to give them the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in the world of work, build positive relationships with other people and find personal happiness. To achieve this goal, we must ask ourselves: How will today's children live in 20 or 40 years? What kind of world…

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…

The standard model of the role of early experience in human development assumes that children's environments in their first years of life are dominant influences on who they become as adults. The standard model favors interventions to improve children's long-term outcomes that start early in life and are intensive in time and attention from…

Adolescence is a period in everybody's life that is usually referred to as "time that everybody must go through" or "parents' hell". Transition between childhood and adulthood is indeed of great importance in everybody's life, but it is usually accompanied with a variety of questions, problems, dilemmas and a constant need to…

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…

I watch my eighteen-month old daughter talking to the soft-bodied doll that I have made her. I wonder what she sees in the undefined cloth face. I wonder if she will make a similar doll for her child one day and I wonder if she will wonder as I do. While the repetition across generations of early childhood experience is both common sense and much…

Marriage is on the decline. Men and women of the youngest generation are either marrying in their late twenties or not marrying at all. Childbearing has also been postponed, but not as much as marriage. The result is that a growing proportion of children are born to unmarried parents--roughly 40 percent in recent years, and over 50 percent for…

Schools seem firmly rooted in the emphasis on computational mastery, and seldom seem to have time to develop other areas of mathematical thinking, such as real-world problem solving and the application of mathematical concepts. All too often, children seem to do well in math in the early grades because they easily memorize the facts and the…

Nurturing care in early childhood requires responsive interactions and opportunities to learn; however, there are few large-scale programs in low- and middle-income countries that support parents' ability to provide responsive care and activities that help children learn. The Reach Up training program was developed to increase capacity of…

Long before empirical neurological research validated her insight, Montessori understood that healthy, full-term babies come equipped with a physiological passion for learning. Brain studies have confirmed that most of the brain's development and inner wiring occurs during the first 2 years of life. A newborn's neurons have sparse, weak…

This article seeks to connect ethnographic findings from a study on parenting, childcare and early childhood in Chile's Mapuche communities with facets of the LOPI model. From Facet 1, we observe that children are included in social situations from an early stage, which empowers them to learn how to interact through such instances as greeting…

DC:0-5™: Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood (ZERO TO THREE, 2016) emphasizes the centrality of relationships for young children's development and psychopathology. The authors share the story of a young child and his mother to illustrate the use of DC:0-5, with an emphasis on how…