"Physical development is the window to the whole child. Through watching children move, they reveal their true selves." This groundbreaking book bridges the gap between theory and practice, offering a deeper understanding of young children's physical development in outdoor environments. It explores the specific phases of motor…

Forest school is a form of outdoor learning that takes children into regular and repeated learning experiences in natural settings. Being based on a comprehensive experience with nature, it is assumed to be beneficial for learning and to promote restorative effects on cognitive and emotional function in preschool children. This review aimed to…

Early exploratory behaviors have been proposed to facilitate children's learning, impacting motor, cognitive, language, and social development. This study related the performance of behaviors used to explore oneself to behaviors used to explore objects, and then related both types of exploratory behaviors to motor, language, and cognitive measures…

A long-standing question in developmental science is how the neurodevelopment of the brain influences cognitive functions. Here, we examined the developmental change of resting EEG power and its links to vocabulary acquisition in school-age children. We further explored what mechanisms may mediate the relation between brain rhythm maturation and…

This study aimed to verify the course of maternal anxiety disorders and its impact on child development of toddlers. This is a cohort study that followed 497 pregnant adolescents who received antenatal care in the public health service in a southern city in Brazil. We assessed maternal anxiety disorders during gestation, postpartum, and when…

Purpose: This case series documents developmental changes over time and in response to a novel intervention, Sitting Together and Reaching to Play (START-Play), in children with early-life seizures. Methods: Thirteen children with early-life seizures were included from a subset of participants in the START-Play multisite, randomized controlled…

Research suggests that elements of the family environment may have significant associations with cognitive and language development outcomes. Less is known, however, about the family environment in peri-urban China, where rates of cognitive and language delay in children aged 0-3 years are as high as 51% and 54%, respectively. Using data collected…

The proposed study sought to investigate whether maternal experiences of racial discrimination and gendered racial stress are associated with offspring executive functioning. Total 266 Black mother-child pairs in the United States were assessed from pregnancy through child age of 4 years. We hypothesized that children whose mothers reported higher…

Identifying preservice teachers' perspectives about play and their role as a teacher in play is critical because their perspectives are related to how they organise and involve play in early childhood education. However, very few empirical studies have been conducted to examine how preservice teachers view play. In the present study, 46 preservice…

Background/purpose. This study investigates "manjujai," a traditional Minangkabau parenting practice, as a culturally embedded method of early childhood care and education. The research aims to uncover the meaning and function of "manjujai"--specifically its role in transmitting cultural values, historical narratives, and…

"Systems Approach to Early Childhood Development: Bridging Theory, Policy and Practice" offers a comprehensive and compelling, evidence-based roadmap for strengthening development in early childhood years. Drawing on neuroscience, developmental psychology, developmental diversity and laws for protecting children, the book presents the…

The neural representation of visual-spatial functions has traditionally been ascribed to the right hemisphere, but little is known about these representations in children, including whether and how lateralization of function changes over the course of development. Some studies suggest bilateral activation early in life that develops toward…

Childcare services are widely used by families and thereby exert an important influence on many young children. Yet, little research has examined whether childcare may impact the development of child executive functioning (EF), one of the pillars of cognitive development in early childhood. Furthermore, despite persisting hypotheses that childcare…

Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…