The socio-emotional experiences of infants during transitions to early childhood education and care (ECEC) and across their first year in these out-of-home contexts are not well known. In an international project across five countries (New Zealand, Finland, Australia, Scotland and the United States), observational data, video of key moments, plus…

One of the earliest challenges for infants and their parents is developing a diurnal sleep--wake cycle. Although the human biological rhythm is circadian by nature, its development varies across cultures, based in part on "zeitgebers" (German: literally "time-givers") or environmental cues. This study uses the developmental…

Can well-documented gender differences in evaluations of prosocial versus antisocial actions found in childhood and adulthood be traced to sex differences in basic sociomoral preferences in infancy? We provide an answer to this question by meta-analyzing sex differences in preference for prosocial over antisocial agents in a set of 53 samples of…

The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully "hands-off"…

Speech problems affect about 66% of children with classic galactosemia (CG), but limited evidence is reported on early motor and sensory motor development in this at-risk population. Research has been focused on speech and language development, leaving a paucity of data on motor and sensory differences. This paper describes preliminary data…

Infant and toddler pedagogy has flourished as a specialized area of practice in early childhood care and education settings, yet it remains an under-researched area. There is also limited empirical research internationally that explores cultural meanings of meaningful provision for this young age group. This ethnographic study explored pedagogies…

Few studies have compared knowledge of the specific health risks of cannabis across jurisdictions. This study aimed to examine perceptions of the health risks of cannabis in Canada and US states with and without legal non-medical cannabis. Cross-sectional data were collected from the 2018 and 2019 International Cannabis Policy Study online…

Background: As delays or disorders in early language and communication are the most prevalent symptom in children with disabilities, early screening is crucial to promote prevention, early diagnosis, and intervention. However, to the best of our knowledge, no screening tool is available for the joint assessment of early language and social…

Fluent conversation requires temporal organization between conversational exchanges. By performing a systematic review and Bayesian multi-level meta-analysis, we map the trajectory of infants' turn-taking abilities over the course of early development (0 to 70 months). We synthesize the evidence from 26 studies (78 estimates from 429 unique…

The annual National Deafblind Child Count is the world's first and longest-running count of children who are deafblind. Begun in 1986 on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education, it represents a collaborative effort between the National Center on Deafblindness (NCDB) and state deafblind projects throughout the country, including those in the…

American parents and policymakers are failing to acknowledge the significant links between early childhood literacy and academic success. This experimental study investigated the effects of daily reading with 150 infants between the ages of 14 to 28 months throughout a 28-day period. Participants from all economic, demographic, and ethnic…

Play is a central discourse in policy and practice pertaining to young children's learning, development and well-being in many countries around the world. Dominant ways of understanding and advocating for play often construct universalising notions of children and childhood, overlooking that play is always-already culturally situated and…

Although a large body of literature recognises the impact of parent-teacher relationships on infant everyday experiences, less is known about the emotional experience and associated expectations of the adults themselves during earliest transitions. In the context of a multi-site international investigation across five countries -- Brazil, Finland,…

In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important…

This research study recruited 107 fathers from the United States (n = 31), Taiwan (n = 36), and Thailand (n = 37) to examine fathers' involvement in daily caregiving and engagement tasks, as well as fathers' accessibility to their infant(s) during weekdays and the weekend. Results indicated that the most influential demographic variables on father…