The manner in which mothers engage in emotional discussion, or reminisce, with their young children about past emotional experiences poses important ramifications for child socioemotional and cognitive development. Maltreating mothers may have difficulty engaging in emotionally supportive reminiscing. The current study examined the role of…

Publicly funded center-based preschool programs were designed to enhance low-income children's early cognitive and social-emotional skills in preparation for kindergarten. In the U.S., the federal Head Start program and state-funded public school-based pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs are the two primary center-based settings in which low-income…

Public prekindergarten (pre-K) programs have been a recent focus of policy and research attention, in part because of their empirically documented, positive short-term impacts on child cognitive development and school readiness. However, no studies have explored factors that might explain variation across schools in public pre-K impacts. The…

We tested a culturally integrative model examining the associations among economic hardship during infancy and Latino children's later sociobehavioral problems and academic skills prior to kindergarten entry, whether mothers' mental health problems and positive parenting behaviors mediated those associations, and whether they varied by mothers'…

There is strong evidence that self-regulatory processes are linked to early academic skills, both concurrently and longitudinally. The majority of extant longitudinal studies, however, have been conducted using autoregressive techniques that may not accurately model change across time. The purpose of this study was to examine the unique…

Although the strong link between maternal education and children's outcomes is one of the most well-established findings in developmental psychology (Reardon, 2011; Sirin, 2005), less is known about how young, low-income children are influenced by their mothers completing additional education. In this research, longitudinal data from the Head…

Consistent with models of environmental sensitivity (Pluess, 2015), research suggests that the effects of parents' behaviors on child adjustment are stronger among children who struggle to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors compared with children with better self-regulation. This study extended prior research by assessing maternal…

This longitudinal study examined developmental links between closeness in teacher-child relationships and children's receptive language ability from the end of the preschool years into the early elementary years, while controlling for changes in peer interaction quality and child behavioral functioning. The sample included children and their…

The present study explores the effects of parental scaffolding of children's problem solving on the development of executive function (EF). Eighty-two children were assessed at 2, 3, and 4 years of age on a variety of EF tasks and, at ages 2 and 3, on a problem-solving puzzle with which parents offered structured assistance (i.e., scaffolding).…

Dual-process theories have been proposed to explain normative and heuristic responses to reasoning and decision-making problems. Standard unitary and dual-process theories predict that normative responses should increase with age. However, research has focused recently on exceptions to this standard pattern, including developmental increases in…

We used longitudinal data from a birth cohort study, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, to investigate the links between Head Start and school readiness in a large and diverse sample of urban children at age 5 (N = 2,803; 18 cities). We found that Head Start attendance was associated with enhanced cognitive ability and social…

Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A…

Groups of middle-aged and elderly women were compared on problem solving behavior. Results indicated a decline in the use of classification skills among the elderly and an inability to use constraint-seeking questions. (ST)

Maintains author's interpretation of 6-month-olds' behavior is consistent with task requirements in the 2000 study and previous work showing that infants use explanatory inferences to make sense of their world. Asserts that ability to understand that people communicate with persons but act on objects is precursor to infants' understanding at 9 to…

The relationship of socioeconomic status (SES) to the etiology of physical child abuse and the consequences of abuse for child development was studied. There was an interaction of SES with abuse status. This suggests different relationships between SES and child rearing in abusive and nonabusive families. (BC)