While considerable research has examined gender development in middle childhood, little longitudinal work has been conducted at this time to indicate whether, for example, youth who show more or less gender conformity at one point continue to do so later. The present study investigated the consistency of gender identity and preferences for…

Parental warmth and hostility are two key dimensions of parenting for child development, but the differential effects of these parenting dimensions on child prosocial and antisocial development has not been adequately investigated. The current study hypothesized that parental warmth would be uniquely related to child callous-unemotional traits and…

Prior research suggests that social relations may play a role in explaining individual differences in cognitive functioning in older adulthood. In particular, early life maternal relationship quality (MRQ) has been shown to be a strong predictor of later-life socioemotional outcomes and may also contribute to later-life cognitive outcomes. The…

The present study examined the early parenting and temperament determinants of children's antisocial and positive behaviors in a low-income, diverse ethno-racial sample. Participants were from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, which included 960 European American (initial M age = 15.00 months; 51.2% female) and 880 African…

Despite the increasing prevalence of 3-generation family households (grandparent, parent, child), relatively little research has studied these households during early childhood. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Birth Cohort ("N" = ~6,550), this study investigated the associations between…

Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007) reported that exposure to Baby Einstein videos was negatively associated with language development. The current study uses the Zimmerman et al. (2007) data set to replicate and extend the original analyses. Caregivers of 392 children aged 6 to 16 months and 358 children aged 17 to 27 months reported on…

The current study is one of the first prospective examinations of longitudinal associations between observed father caregiving behaviors and child cortisol reactivity and regulation in response to emotional arousal. Observations of father and mother caregiving behaviors and child cortisol levels in response to challenges at 7 months and 24 months…

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…

With data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n = 6,449), a nationally representative sample of births in 2001, we used hierarchical linear modeling to analyze differences in observed interactions between married, cohabiting, never-married, and divorced mothers and their children. In contrast to previous studies, we…

The purpose of this study was to examine the frequency and correlates of cross-racial/ethnic friendships. The sample consisted of 509 (188 African American, 135 European American, 106 Asian American, and 80 Latino) children in 4th grade from 39 classrooms in several public elementary schools. The authors hypothesized that (a) the frequency of…

Studied after-school activities of third graders for two years. Found that children attending after-school programs spent more time on academic and extracurricular activities; children in informal care spent more time watching television and "hanging out." Sex differences were reported in the type of activities. Time spent in activities was…