Research suggests that behavioral self-regulation skills are critical for early school success, but few studies have explored such links among young children in Europe. This study examined the contribution of early self-regulation to academic achievement gains among children in France, Germany, and Iceland. Gender differences in behavioral…

This article contributes new evidence on the associations among immigrant generation, gender, and sexual risk behavior among Latino adolescents in the United States. Longitudinal data from 3,272 Latino adolescents (grades 7-12) who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) were examined for evidence of the…

This study investigated the links between racial discrimination and school engagement and the roles of racial socialization and ethnic identity as protective factors in those linkages in a sample of 148, sixth through twelfth grade African American adolescents from working and middle-class two-parent families. In home interviews, youth described…

The current study examines the social and behavioral development of school-age children with different histories of overweight onset. Eight thousand children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) participated. Three groups of children were identified for analysis: (1) those who were persistently overweight from…

Researchers have theorized that programs to promote positive citizenship should begin with an opportunity for adolescents to participate in civic activities, such as community service or political volunteering. In this article we extend the theory by arguing that a more systemic approach is needed, in which a civic context is developed to promote…

To examine the emotional and behavioral impact of terrorism on children across the country, telephone interviews were conducted with a national probability sample of 395 parents of 5- to 18-year-old children from November 9 to 28, 2001. Parents reported on child emotional and behavioral reactions to terrorism, parent-child discussions about…

This study examined how various components of school engagement contribute to the academic performance of African American adolescents. The sample consisted of 499 African American adolescents in Grades 9 to 11. We investigated how adolescents' gender, grade, cognitive functioning, and parental education affect their school engagement and whether…

This longitudinal study involving repeated telephone interviews of a national probability sample assessed parents' and other adults' own psychological vulnerability, as well as any observed reactions of coresident and other children, immediately after September 11th, 2001 (N = 752) and again 1 year later (N = 484). For a significant minority of…

School readiness assessment is a prominent feature of early childhood education. Because the construct of readiness is multifaceted, we examined children's patterns on multiple indicators previously found to be both theoretically and empirically linked to school readiness: social skill, interactions with parents, problem behavior, and performance…

Approximately 2 weeks after September 11th, adolescents from a national sample of households who were indirectly exposed to the terrorist attacks through the media completed a Web-based survey that assessed event-related acute stress symptoms. One year later, these adolescents (N = 142) and a randomly selected parent from their household completed…