Background: It is widely accepted that family caregivers are central to the future of cancer care and the impetus is to understand how best to support and empower them. Aims: This study explored the role of the relationship between the caregiver and the child, the level of perceived support, and the self-compassion of the caregiver, on distress…

Purpose: Intentional communication acts, or purposefully directed vocalizations and gestures, are particularly difficult for infants at elevated likelihood for eventual diagnosis of autism. The ability to measure and track intentional communication in infancy thus has the potential to aid early identification and intervention efforts. This study…

The research presented in this article scrutinises how baby room leaders construct babyhood and how this impacts their practice. Our research feeds into a growing body of research that challenges the dominant developmentalist paradigm in early childhood education and care (ECEC) and instead highlights possibilities for self-determination, agency…

The study adopts a multimodal perspective, looking at adults' use of gestures in variation sets (VS; i.e. sequences of partial self-repetitions occurring in successive utterances of varying form) addressed to Spanish-learning toddlers in adult-child interactions. We seek to address the following question: Do adults make simultaneous use of VS and…

In South Africa, many infants spend more time with carers other than their parents due to socio-economic demands on mothers. Carers thus play an important role in the infants' lives. This qualitative study explored child carers' knowledge and understanding of the 'first 1000 days' initiative and their perception of themselves as attachment…

Many existing preventive intervention programs focus on promoting responsive parenting practices. However, these parenting programs are often long in duration and expensive, and meta-analytic evidence indicates that families facing high levels of adversity typically benefit less. Moreover, due to a lack of specification and evaluation of…

The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child-directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co-occurrence. Previous work using these models has not…

Caregiver abstract talk during shared reading predicts preschool-age children's vocabulary development. However, previous research has focused on level of abstraction with less consideration of the style of extratextual talk. Here, we investigated the relation between these two dimensions of extratextual talk, and their contributions to variance…

Caregivers (i.e., parents and members of a child's caring community) are underappreciated stakeholders in learning analytics. Although caregiver involvement can enhance student academic outcomes, many obstacles hinder involvement, most notably knowledge gaps with respect to modern school curricula. An emerging topic of interest in learning…

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an…

Prior theoretical and empirical studies have linked the first 3 years of children's life with later life outcomes. One primary explanation is the critical role these experiences play in children's early brain development (including their early language and cognitive abilities) and subsequent schooling achievement. The current study is a registered…

This article is a literature synthesis of the living conditions of black children after their parent's imprisonment. In Africa, the prison population currently stands at 1,194,497, while in South Africa, 147,922 people were being held in correctional facilities as of January 2021. Parental incarceration has affected all children, regardless of…

Children learn to perform actions on artifacts in their environments from infancy, but the ways caregivers support this learning during everyday interactions are relatively unexplored. This study investigated how naturalistic caregiver-child teaching interactions promoted conventional action learning in toddlers. Caregivers of 32 24- to…

This study explores how daycare staff perceive children's reactions to the illness and loss of a parent, the support needs of bereaved children, and the staff's role as supporters. Data were generated through conducting focus groups with 23 employees from eight Danish daycare institutions. The study finds that staff focus on assisting children to…

The ways caregivers perceive and respond to challenging behavior (CB) could depend, in part, on their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Yet, limited research is available on the definitions, perceptions, and response strategies of CB across cultural groups, particularly among caregivers of young children with disabilities. In this exploratory…