The present study aimed to examine the effect of activity engagement, age, language proficiency, and time elapse on children's response accuracy to adult's questions. A total of 70, 3- to 6-year-old children participated in the study, engaging in a story-telling activity, a proficiency test, and two interviews. Additionally, 57 of these children…

Several challenges arise when researchers or practitioners attempt to assess the literacy skills of toddlers, including a lack of developmentally appropriate measures, toddlers' more limited communication ability, and how literacy is defined in the years before age three. This paper describes four new measures of early literacy development and…

This article is based on a research project focusing on Norwegian teachers' planning and documentation of children's learning in preschool. Norwegian preschools follow a national curriculum and teachers are obliged to document both professional practice and learning outcomes. The aim of the article is to investigate teachers' experiences of…

Babysign classes are increasingly popular across the UK. Benefits are said to include increasing child vocabulary, reducing frustration, and improving parent-child relations. A further relationship between the use of babysign and maternal mind-mindedness (MM) has been suggested. It was hypothesized here that parents choosing babysign classes would…

The purpose of this article is to explore the way preschool teachers teach reflective care in Japan. The article builds on a two-month ethnographic study conducted in Japanese kindergartens and nurseries among children aged 3-6 years. The data were analysed using concepts of age and gender. The results show that care in Japan, in contrast to…

This study examined parents' developmentally appropriate beliefs about young children's play and parents' views on their child's play skills. This exploratory secondary data analysis was drawn from data on low-income African-American and Latino parents and their children (n = 109) participating in Head Start programmes in the USA. Compared with…

The curricula for young children rarely provide specific teaching about how to conserve earth's resources. Yet, adults need to help children early in life become aware of and actively involved in ecologically sensitive and sound practices. Interviews were conducted individually with 41 children (4- to 6-year-olds; 7- to 9-year-olds and 10- to…

This study compared father-son and mother-son involvement in two-parent families from early to middle childhood. Ninety-four families were recruited for a three-year follow-up study that began when the children were four years old. At each time point, in comparison to mothers, fathers were less accessible to their son on weekdays, and spent more…

This paper describes a study performed to investigate the impact of the conflict in Syria on Syrian refugee children. The Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan was chosen for this task. Two control (comparison) groups of children were selected: one from the Jordanian Ramtha district, which is just across the border from Syria, and that indirectly feel…

The aim of our research was to investigate social and emotional skills that determine pre-schoolers' aggressive and pro-social behaviours in stressful situations. The sample of the empirical study consisted of 119 (36-48, 49-60 and 61-72 months) Hungarian children from six pre-schools. Instruments that were used: Coping strategy self-report and…

Eating behaviours begin to develop during early childhood, but relatively little is known about preschoolers' nutrition knowledge. The current study examined age and gender differences in this knowledge using two tasks: food group classification and the creation of unhealthy, healthy and preferred meals. Sixty-nine three- to six-year-old children…

A mixed methods approach was used to examine how young adults (n = 1012) perceive fathers as targets for attachment support. Participants ranked the level of attachment support received and sought from fathers, mothers, best friends, and romantic partners, and provided relationship-specific information on additional indices of social support…

Maternal characteristics can affect a mother's decision to breastfeed. This study used a cross-sectional design to assess maternal variables and infant feeding patterns among nursing mothers attending an immunisation clinic in Ibadan, Nigeria. A total of 264 mothers who consecutively attended the immunisation clinic and met certain inclusion…

Research on children's concepts of intelligence has not considered how children conceptualise specific thinking skills. This study extends previous research on the development of children's concepts of intelligence and produces novel data on children's understandings of effective thinking and thinking skills. Seventy-five children were sampled…

Twenty 5-year-olds and 20 8-year-olds were asked to tell 6 stories about health and illness. Analysis of stories did not support a stage theory of developmental changes in children's understanding of illness. Results suggest that young children share many ideas about illness with older children. (CB)