Youth homelessness is a growing concern in the United States. Despite difficulties studying this population due to inconsistent definitions of what it means to be a youth and homeless, the current body of research indicates that abuse, family breakdown, and disruptive family relationships are common contributing factors to youth homelessness.…

Focused on (1) the effect of mother-child interaction during a problem-solving task on subsequent, independent child performance; and (2) the variability in the division of task responsibilities and maternal regulation of the child as a function of task difficulty, child age, and task component. Participants were 60 three to five year olds and…

This study tested the hypothesis that social competence of mother-infant play reflects both secure mother-infant attachment and more advanced cognitive development. Subjects were 58 toddlers between 16 and 19 months of age and their mothers. Two general methods were used: observation and maternal report. Standardized developmental assessments were…

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed past events with their mothers and completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and understanding of knowledge. Found that theory-of-mind scores were related to memory conversation participation, independent of age and linguistic skill, and to the frequency of…

Updating a 1977 review, this review of the research concerning parents' effects on their children's development asks what progress has been made in understanding such effects during the last decade. After presenting findings of the earlier review, discussion focuses on five areas of research: temperament, attachment, cognitive development,…

Provided in this annual report, the 10th of a series, are the texts of four papers presented at a preconference workshop on new directions for infancy research. The papers focus on the middle European contribution to infancy research, main themes in European research on infant perception and cognition, an innovative therapeutic approach to…

Goals of this study were to: (1) assess mothers' perceptions of their role in fostering their preschooler's cognitive learning; (2) examine attributions used by mothers to explain why they experience ease or difficulty helping their preschooler learn; and (3) relate maternal perceived level of ease/difficulty to attributions for the reasons…

This study sought to determine whether differences existed between infants from low socioeconomic status (SES) families and those from high SES families in the occipital rhythmic activity of the brain, as recorded in their electroencephalograms (EEGs), as well as in other developmental measures. Ten low SES white infants and 10 high SES white…

Input language may have an effect on child development that goes far beyond language development alone. Language is the medium by which children acquire at least a portion of their sex role and social class or group characteristics, world view, and emotional and psychological well-being. Existing theories of psychological development ignore…

This document contains five symposium papers exploring sex differences in cognition. The first paper defines the purposes of the study, i.e., to examine which cognitive performance factors are related to sex differences, and to investigate possible biological, social, and psychological factors affecting developmental sex differences. The second…

Reviews research on the development of intentional communication between adult and child. Suggests that the communicative partnership between caregiver and child is dynamic, functioning to assist in the developmental achievements of the child and also functioning as a mechanism for socializing the child and his or her partner into the appropriate…

Used growth modeling to examine relationship of early parenting to cognitive, language, and social development from 6 to 40 months in full-term and very low birth weight (medically low or high risk) children. Found that behaviors that were sensitive to children's focus of interest and did not highly control or restrict their behaviors predicted…

The finding of positive effects of developmentally sensitive interaction on children's physical health is discussed and expanded in terms of five propositions. The first is that development requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activities on a regular basis over an extended period of time, with at least one person…

The intellectual model of Jean Piaget asserts that individuals pass through a series of various intellectual stages as they mature. Human development is categorized into four basic stages: (1) sensory motor stage, which lasts from birth to about eighteen months; (2) preoperational stage, lasting from eighteen months to about seven years; (3)…