Physical abuse is one subtype of child abuse and it has been a worldwide public health issue for its detrimental effects on child development, profiles, predictors, and its relation with behavior problems need further exploration, particularly in Chinese children. This study attempts to explore profiles and predictors of physical abuse and to…

"Research Findings:" The present study aims to investigate the relationship between physical fitness and visuomotor integration in young children. A total of 242 three- to six-year-old preschoolers were randomly selected from a preschool in Shenzhen, China and their visuomotor integration and physical fitness were evaluated using the…

Research Findings: This study investigates the ideal and realistic second-child fertility willingness of Chinese parents and the associated factors. Altogether 4,510 Chinese parents of only-child (ages 3-6 years) were sampled and surveyed online. The descriptive and logistic regression analyses indicated that: (1) about 74.1% of the parents were…

Research Findings: Children's capacities for complex socio-moral reasoning carries across domains; similarly, children's aggressive behaviors changes as a function of context. However, with a few exceptions, little research has considered children's socio-moral reasoning and aggressive subtypes in concert. The goals of the current study were to…

Research Findings: This study employed data from the TIMSS 2015 survey to investigate whether parental educational involvement behaviour in early childhood and parental attitudes towards education can enhance children's mathematics achievement in the 4th grade via influencing children's learning interests. Samples from Singapore (N=6237) and Hong…

Research Findings: A substantial body of research has demonstrated social and academic benefits of sociodramatic play (SDP) for young children. However, substantially less research has explored the factors related to increased amounts of SDP occurring during free play, an activity time that comprises the greatest portion of the daily schedule in…

Rejection by peers has devastating effects on children's social-cognitive development. As language difficulties have been found to be one of the underlying causes of peer rejection, the present study focused on the relation between these two variables. Specifically, this study was the first to test a hypothesized model connecting children's level…

Research Findings: The present study examined patterns of longitudinal associations between inhibitory control (IC) and early academic skills during the preschool and kindergarten years. Using data from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey Cohort 2009 (FACES 2009) (N = 939), a national data set of predominantly low-income children…

Teachers in toddler classrooms are important agents of emotion socialization. The current study examined teachers' use of emotion minimizing language in toddler classrooms and toddlers' social emotional competence. Teachers' emotion minimizing language is described as language that purposefully distances them from a child's emotions and…

Research Findings: The current study examined the moderating effects of gender and teacher-child relationship on the association between shyness and school adjustment (school liking and avoidance, cooperative and independent participation). The sample consisted of 524 preschool students from 3 cities of Shandong province in northern China. Mothers…

Early fine motor ability is significantly associated with later achievement, even after controlling for typical child-level predictors of school outcomes. Previous longitudinal studies have confirmed this but typically have not included low-income, at-risk populations. Research has distinguished two different aspects of fine motor skills: those…

Research Findings: Drawing from a diverse community sample of 89 children, ages 4-6, their primary caregivers and teachers, this study examined the interplay of child emotional behavior problems, parent emotion socialization practices, and gender in predicting teacher-child closeness. Teachers reported on perceptions of closeness with children.…

Research Findings: In this study, we investigated associations among social cognition skills (specifically, emotion knowledge and theory of mind), language abilities, and 3 varieties of prosocial behavior (helping, sharing, and comforting) in early childhood. The effects of age and gender were also taken into account. Participants were 149 Italian…

Research Findings: The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between social play and involvement in the outdoor preschool environment. The study included 173 children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years (M[subscript age] = 3.95, SD = 0.82) and attending 19 preschools in the Basque Country (Spain). A total of 51 teachers…

Research Findings: Self-regulation in young children predicts later social adjustment and academic success across cultural contexts. Therefore, it is crucial to identify factors that promote or inhibit behavioral self-regulation skills. In this study, we focus on gender and socioeconomic status (SES; parental education and income) as possible…