Around the world, children who grow up in poverty and children who grow up in middle-class homes rarely have opportunities to get to know one another. Tapori is a friendship network that seeks to make connections between disparate groups of children. Its newsletter shares true stories from the point of view of children living in challenging…

Language abilities in early childhood show stability over time and play an important role in the development of other cognitive processes. Identifying modifiable environmental risk factors is important to informing prevention and early intervention efforts. Maternal verbal ability has been previously linked to child verbal ability. The current…

A presumed setback in development between 16 and 27 months of age was studied by reviewing the literature on setback in development and longitudinal studies of children with blindness or visual impairment. The results showed that the period around the second year of life is a vulnerable period for these children, in which about 25-33% of the…

The articles in this issue of "New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development" nicely summarize recent findings about creativity and development. This commentary underscores some of the key ideas and puts them into a larger context (i.e., the corpus of creativity research). It pinpoints areas of agreement (e.g., the need to take…

Montessori environments offer concrete learning materials, with controls of error embedded in their design, that support independence, engage the child's interest, and provide individual challenges. Yet, over time, Crystal Dahlmeier has observed changes in some Montessori environments: worksheets taking the place of hands-on work with materials;…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder and average IQ exhibit a widening discrepancy between lagging adaptive skills relative to their cognitive potential, but it is unknown when this discrepancy emerges in development. To address this important question, we measured adaptive and cognitive skills longitudinally, from 12-36 months, in 96…

University-school partnerships can be a powerful mechanism for educator professional learning, but they have varying degrees of success. In South Carolina's School District 5 of Lexington and Richland Counties, superintendent Christina Melton wanted to make sure her district's partnership with the University of South Carolina would strategically…

This review challenges the traditional interpretation of infants' and young children's responses to three types of potentially "fear-inducing" stimuli--snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers. The traditional account is that these stimuli are the objects of infants' earliest developing fears. We present evidence against the…

Farah Pandith is an author, foreign policy strategist, and former diplomat. She served as the first-ever special representative to Muslim communities for the US Department of State. She is the author of "How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders, and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the…

This study examines associations between stimulating-responsive social interactions with mothers and nonparental childcare providers during the first 3 years of life and children's vocabulary and mathematics skills through age 15 (N = 1,364). Additive relations were found in which more stimulating-responsive interactions with mothers and with…

Erickson and Thompson articulate and defend reasonableness as an important civic educational aim for early childhood education. In this response, I argue that further clarity regarding the nature and scope of "reasonableness" as an educational concept or idea is needed. Is such a concept fundamentally political, or does it capture a…

In this article, I address African indigenous knowledge of early childhood development by discussing young children's cultural spaces of care, play and learning among the Guji people of Ethiopia. I analyze practices in the cultural spaces of young children and show how participatory community-based care and learning are pivotal in the tradition of…

Parental engagement in home-based learning activities is linked to children's academic skills. Yet, interventions that try to enhance parental engagement -- sometimes targeted to families with low levels of education -- have small effects. This study aimed to inform supports for families by examining how different types of home-based learning…

This report summarizes the findings from a two-year mixed methods evaluation of the effect of the Teach For Nigeria (TFN) teacher training program on whole child development, perceptions of teaching quality, and the school community. This report contributes to a growing body of research on Teach For All organizations across the globe and the…

De facto school segregation, stemming from structural racism, has myriad consequences for children's development. Extant research documents the implications of segregated schools for children's academic resources and opportunities, but there is less attention on the social processes that unfold as a result of school segregation, particularly in…