Background: The theoretical framework of the current study is based on mediated learning experience (MLE) theory, which is similar to the scaffolding concept. The main question of the current study was to what extent mother-child MLE strategies affect psychological resilience and cognitive modifiability of boys with learning disability (LD).…

The current study examines the contributions of family context (e.g. life events, home environments) to low-income preschool children's self-regulation (behaviour regulation and executive function) in the United States and Turkey. Participants were 1139 low-income children (486 from the U.S. and 653 from Turkey) and their parents. Children's…

Although previous research has established the association between early-grade mathematics knowledge and later mathematics achievement, few studies have measured mathematical skills prior to school entry, and few have investigated the predictive power of early gains in mathematics ability. The current paper relates mathematical skills measured at…

Research Findings: The roles of child lexical diversity and maternal sensitivity in the development of young children's inhibitory control were examined in 100 low-income Hispanic Spanish-speaking children. Child communication utterances at age 2½ years were transcribed from 10-min mother-child interactions to quantify lexical diversity. Maternal…

Research Findings: There is growing evidence that home learning stimulation that includes informal numeracy experiences can promote math-related learning in school. Furthermore, national studies suggest that children who start kindergarten with stronger math skills are more likely to succeed in high school. This study used a large sample of…

We examined the associations between academic achievement and arts involvement (access to a musical instrument for the child at home, participation in unspecified after-school arts activities) in a sample of 2339 11-12-year-olds surveyed in the USA between 1998 and 2008. We compared the contributions of these variables to other kinds of cognitive…

This study examines whether maternal warmth moderates the association between maternal use of spanking and increased child aggression between ages 1 and 5. Participants were 3,279 pairs of mothers and their children from a cohort study of urban families from 20 U.S. cities. Maternal spanking was assessed when the child was 1 year, 3 years, and 5…

Research Findings: This study investigates the effect of the early home environment on self-regulation in preschoolers, and how self-regulation relates to later school achievement, while taking into account family resources. Participants were part of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth…

A number of studies, both small scale and of nationally-representative student samples, have reported substantial associations between school entry math ability and later elementary school achievement. However, questions remain regarding the persistence of the association between early growth in math ability and later math achievement due to the…

Research Findings: The home literacy environment and other early learning settings such as preschool play a role in children's language and literacy outcomes, yet research suggests that Latino, Spanish-speaking families are less likely than other families to participate in family literacy activities. This study explored the relations among…

Extant research has highlighted the importance of multiple characteristics of housing but has not comprehensively assessed a broad range of housing characteristics and their relative contributions to children's well-being. Using a representative, longitudinal sample of low-income children and adolescents from low-income urban neighborhoods (N =…

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scale has been shown to be a significant predictor of later cognitive outcomes in many cultures. Therefore identifying factors associated with HOME could be used to promote child development. Maternal psychological well-being is often overlooked although critical in the creation of…