The Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) is preparing to undertake the work of reviewing the state early learning standards - Indiana's Early Learning Foundations (the "Foundations"). In anticipation of this work, staff at IDOE have requested support from the Region 8 Comprehensive Center in identifying approaches states have taken in…

Infants, toddlers, and young children have unique needs when separated from their primary caregivers because of child abuse and neglect. Parents of these children often have their own histories of abuse and neglect and can benefit from assessments and interventions that bear in mind the effect caregiving histories have on present parenting. This…

The author was wholly unprepared for what he encountered when he entered Fraiberg's Child Development Project at the University of Michigan in 1973, joining five others in a special 2-year training program in infant mental health. He sputtered in astonishment. He resisted the interpretations. But there was no turning back, once he was exposed (on…

High rates of infant and toddler screen media use coupled with research indicating no benefit to this viewing have led the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to advise against any screen media use with children less than 2 years old and less than 2 hours per day of entertainment programming for children 2 years and older (AAP, 2011). Our survey…

TV and DVDs serve an important role in the daily life of many families. Parents introduce their infants to video to keep them busy while the adults attend to chores. As members of the "Sesame Street Generation," parents also trust TV as a source of learning for their very young children. Research indicates that, in some cases, this trust…

Drawing on Thomas, Whybrow and Scharber's four participatory perspectives, this paper describes and complicates endeavours to move beyond utilitarian perspectives of infant participation in participatory research. It proposes that film-mediated encounters between researchers and infants have the potential to be more than sites that privilege…

As humans, we are attuned to the moods and emotions of others. This understanding of emotions enables us to interpret other people's actions on the basis of their emotional displays. However, the development of this capacity is not well understood. Here we show a developmental pattern in 10- and 14-month-old infants' sensitivity to others'…

This article challenges traditional approaches to emotion as a discreet biological or dialectic process in the early years. In doing so the proposition is made that emotion is an answerable social act of meaning-making and self-hood. Inspired by Bakhtinian philosophy, which resists separating emotion from cognition or the individual from their…

Children living in poverty or born to teenage parents are at increased risk for developmental delays as well as child neglect. Research has shown that one effective avenue for preventive intervention is teaching parents to recognize and respond to their young children's communicative signals using responsive caregiving behaviors (e.g., warmth and…

This paper offers an overview of research on infants' early behavior toward televised images, followed by an account of the development of "representational competence" with video. Several aspects of representation are involved in young children's understanding and use of video. From a very young age, children form mental representations of the…

For some time now, questions have been asked about the impact of television and video materials on the cognitive and social development of preschoolers and older children. More recently, these same questions have been asked in relation to the extensive exposure to these media that infants and toddlers are currently experiencing. To answer these…

Autism is one of the most heritable neurodevelopmental conditions and has an early onset, with symptoms being required to be present in the first 3 years of life in order to meet criteria for the "core" disorder in the classification systems. As such, the focus on identifying a prodrome over the past 20 years has been on pre-clinical…

This project report describes how five children (an infant, three toddlers, and a preschooler) enrolled at a private day care home engaged in their first journey into project work through a study of Canada geese living on a nearby body of water. Prior to the experience described in this paper, the author had used the Project Approach only with…

Evidence-based practices (EBPs) are the basis on which teachers and other service providers are required to design educational programs for learners with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). As part of their work with the National Professional Development Center (NPDC) on ASD, researchers developed a process for reviewing the research literature and…

This paper offers a way of thinking about the process of parent-infant psychotherapy. I start by outlining some ideas as to what can go awry in troubled parent-infant relationships, and then a way of working with parents with pre-verbal babies. I suggest a model for understanding three interlaced levels at which change might occur if a…