This longitudinal research examines maternal and child behaviors during joint planning over a 3-year period of middle childhood. 118 mother-child dyads were observed once a year beginning when the children were 8 years of age. Coding focused on mother and child planning behaviors, maternal instructional support, and child task engagement.…

Social approach and social avoidance goals (i.e., approach of positive and avoidance of negative outcomes in social situations) are important predictors of the feeling of being socially integrated or isolated. However, little is known about the development of these goals across adulthood. In a large diary study with N = 744 young (18-39 years),…

We examined the prediction that the interaction between Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene ("NR3C1") methylation, stress, and experienced maternal support predicts anxious and avoidant attachment development. This was tested in a general population sample of 487 children and adolescents (44% boys, M[subscript age] = 11.84, SD[subscript age] =…

Our newly proposed integrated academic self-concept model integrates 3 major theories of academic self-concept formation and developmental perspectives into a unified conceptual and methodological framework. Relations among math self-concept (MSC), school grades, test scores, and school-level contextual effects over 6 years, from the end of…

Given that maternal support promotes healthy social and emotional development in early childhood, it is important to understand the predictors of such support, especially during emotional challenges. In this study, mothers' dispositional distress reactivity (i.e., the tendency toward experiencing distress in response to children's negative…

Theorists argue that parental reflective functioning (PRF) is activated in response to emotions, potentially supporting parenting sensitivity even when arousal is high. That is, when parents become emotionally reactive when interacting with their children, those who can use PRF to understand their children's mental states should be able to parent…

In this study we evaluated whether the sophistication of children's invented spellings in kindergarten was predictive of subsequent reading and spelling in Grade 1, while also considering the influence of well-known precursors. Children in their first year of schooling (mean age = 66 months; N = 171) were assessed on measures of oral vocabulary,…

We investigated the role of sociocultural (between-groups) and individual (within-group) factors on the development of preschoolers' resource-allocation preferences. We tested claims of the "joint impact hypothesis" of social values development that social-emotional understanding skills would predict the transition from simpler…

Learning the names of geometric shapes is at the intersection of early spatial, mathematical, and language skills, all important for school-readiness and predictors of later abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We investigated whether socioeconomic status (SES) influenced children's processing of shape names and…

Although social difficulties have been identified as sequelae of children's experiences with interparental conflict and insecurity, little is known about the specific mechanisms underlying their vulnerability to social problems. Guided by emotional security theory, this study tested the hypothesis that children's emotional insecurity mediates…

Controversy continues to surround parenting by lesbian and gay (LG) adults and outcomes for their children. As sexual minority parents increasingly adopt children, longitudinal research about child development, parenting, and family relationships is crucial for informing such debates. In the psychological literature, family systems theory contends…

Prior research suggests that parenting affects children's relationships, including those with teachers, although there is variation across individuals in such effects. Given evidence suggesting that oxytocin may be particularly important for the quality of social relationships, we tested the hypotheses (a) that change in parenting from 4 to 6…

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364), the present study supports an agentic perspective; it demonstrates that mothers' depressive symptoms in infancy predict children's poor first-grade cognitive functioning because depressive symptoms…

Asking children to gesture while being taught a concept facilitates their learning. Here, we investigated whether children benefitted equally from producing gestures that reflected speech (speech-gesture matches) versus gestures that complemented speech (speech-gesture mismatches), when learning the concept of palindromes. As in previous studies,…

We evaluated the extent to which the externalizing behavior construct is self-organizing in the first 2 years of life. Based on dynamic systems theory, we hypothesized that changes in physical aggression, defiance, activity level, and distress to limitations would each be predicted by earlier manifestations of one another. These hypotheses were…