Interpersonal connectedness (IC) is an essential social function across life but is critical for young children. IC begins at birth and is vital to emerging physiological and affect regulation, attachment, communication, and cognition. IC occurs through dynamic interactive behavioral coordination, resulting in an embodied dyadic state of shared…

Background: Typical scaffolding coding schemes provide overall scores to compare across a sample. As such, insights into the scaffolding process can be obscured: the child's contribution to the learning; the particular skills being taught and learned; and the overall changes in amount of scaffolding over the course of the task. Aims: This study…

The authors examined the relative stability and variability of self-regulated learning (SRL) in kindergartners across various contexts (teacher-directed activities, small-group work, and independent work). They assessed the role of temperament and context on children's use of SRL while seeking to identify if there are optimal contexts for…

Background: Mother-child mental state talk (MST) supports children's developing social-emotional understanding. In typically developing (TD) children, family conversations about emotion, cognition, and causes have been linked to children's emotion understanding. Specific language impairment (SLI) may compromise developing emotion understanding and…

Recent research suggests that caregiver-child extratextual talk during shared book reading facilitates the development of preschool children's oral language skills. This study investigated the effects of the amount of picturebook text on mother-child extratextual talk during shared book reading. Twenty-four mother-child dyads (children aged…

The present study examined maternal responses to infants' spontaneous communicative behaviors in a sample of 20 extremely-low-gestational-age (ELGA) infants and 20 full-term (FT) infants during 30 minutes of play interaction when infants were 12 months of age. Relations between maternal responses and infants' communication skills at 12 and 24…

In this study, we videotaped two 10-min. free-play interactions and coded speech acts (SAs) in peer talk of 51 preschoolers (21 ASD, 30 typical), interacting with friend versus non-friend partners. Groups were matched for maternal education, IQ (verbal/nonverbal), and CA. We compared SAs by group (ASD/typical), by partner's friendship status…

Purpose: Marital dissatisfaction and conflict often increase for couples after the birth of a child and are evident in fewer positive family interactions and more negative family interactions. Because exercise is known to increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions, the current study examined the extent to which higher levels of…

This research lends insight into disabling discourses on South Asian families of children with disabilities. It explores immigrant Pakistani maternal understanding of their children's disability, uniquely through an educational perspective, highlighting maternal roles which schools must acknowledge to improve outcomes for children. The findings of…

Research comparing the predictive power of parents' control and autonomy support in the United States and China has relied almost exclusively on children's reports. Such reports may lead to inaccurate conclusions if they do not reflect parents' practices to the same extent in the two countries. A total of 394 American and Chinese children…

This study examined associations among low-income mothers' use of attention-getting utterances during shared book reading, preschoolers' verbal engagement and visual attention to reading, and their early literacy skills (N = 51). Mother-child shared book reading sessions were videotaped and coded for each utterance, including attention talk,…

The healthy messages parents convey to their adolescents about risk behaviors may be related to better adolescent outcomes. Few studies have examined the types of messages or strategies caregivers use to discuss dating violence with their early adolescents. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 African American maternal caregivers of…

Purpose: This study explores whether communicative function (CF: reasons for communicating) use differs by socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity, or gender among preschoolers and their mothers. Method: Mother-preschooler dyads (N = 95) from the National Center for Early Development and Learning's (2005) study of family and social environments…

Bookreading is known to benefit young children's language and literacy development. However, research has demonstrated that how adults interact around a book with a child is probably even more important than reading the complete text. Dialogic or interactive reading strategies can promote children's language development more specifically. Little…

The perspectives of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) about family relationships are underrepresented in the literature. The topic of family relationships emerged in a grounded theory exploratory focus group study that involved thirty dually diagnosed participants with moderate or mild intellectual disabilities and histories of…