Maternal substance use and unpredictable maternal sensory signals may affect child development, but no studies have examined them together. We explored the unpredictability, frequency and duration of maternal sensory signals in 52 Caucasian mother-child dyads, 27 with and 25 without maternal substance use. We also examined the association between…

Play is an essential component of childhood, but parents and educators sometimes view it as an optional add-on, which gets in the way of learning. This view persists in spite of evidence that play is helpful and sometimes critical to learning in multiple domains, perhaps because precise mechanisms whereby play occasions learning are not well…

Despite support for the importance of early language environments, little is known about the naturally occurring experiences children have in preschool settings. The current study sample included 91 children (M[subscript age] = 4.72 years; 56% male; 67% White) from 23 preschool classrooms and nearly 1500 h of language environment data from three…

Honesty is an important value that children acquire through socialization. To date, the socialization process by which children learn to behave honestly remains relatively unexamined. Researchers may have left this area of research relatively unexamined because there is no framework to understand how parents socialize honesty and lie-telling in…

Children's early experiences have potential to shape their development through early childhood, middle childhood, and into adolescence. Family structure at birth and material hardship may offer insight into how children's health and well-being are shaped within their family of origin. The current paper examined (a) the association between family…

The family context has been identified as an important predictor of the development of children's executive function (EF). An emerging line of research demonstrates that parents' own EF is linked to their caregiving behaviours and their children's EF. However, researchers have yet to explore the extent to which parental EF is related to specific…

Literature suggests that motor skills are associated with other areas of development or domains, such as language and math, especially at early ages. These results are mainly based on studies developed in medium-to-high sociocultural contexts. Thus, this study was conducted in a medium-to-low-income area. The aim was to know the 4-5 years old…

Developmental delays (DD) are missed early childhood developmental milestones in cognitive, motoric or linguistic domains. DD associated with behaviour problems may compound to impact parenting. This study investigated whether DD would moderate the relation between behaviour problems and parenting in families of toddlers. Data were drawn from an…

We aimed to evaluate the validity of the Ages and Stages Questionnaires Edition 3 (ASQ-3) and the MacArthur communicative development inventory (CDI) as a screening measure for children at risk of language development delay in western rural China, by comparing them to the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (BSID-III). We administered…

Diverse mechanisms account for the familial aggregation of certain personality traits and externalizing psychopathology. We explored the roles of positive and negative parenting as mediators of longitudinal associations between parents' maladaptive personality traits and their children's inattention/hyperactivity problems. We collected self,…

Economic difficulties in early childhood are associated with significant adverse long-term socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. In this study, we examine an understudied financial stressor that is often observed during periods of high unemployment--transient familial financial stress (TFS). We use the early childhood longitudinal study--(birth)…

Children's ability to understand and infer the thoughts and feelings of others influences how they develop a unique view of the world. Examining developmental factors that impact young children's success in both social and cognitive domains has important implications for advancing our current knowledge of social cognition. The purpose of this…

The present study examined children's co-construction of shared meanings and internal state language during play with their sibling and friend from early to middle childhood. Sixty-five 4-year-old children (T1) and 46 7-year-old children (T2) were observed in the home during two free play sessions with a sibling and with a friend at both time…

Increasing amounts of research show that fathers' involvement in children's lives contributes to the child's social, emotional and cognitive development; however, much of the evidence comes from fathers' caregiving and object play. This exploratory study compared the characteristics of 24 Australian fathers' play in two contexts--toy play and…

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false-belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross-sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the…