Maria Montessori's work remains popular and influential around the world. She provided fascinating descriptions of her observations of children's learning. Yet at the heart of her work is a lacuna: the issue of how children learn their first language. For Montessori, it was a marvel, a miracle--but a mystery. We argue that the later philosophy of…

In this article I wish to defend hope by arguing that it is a child-like predisposition and that its strength and uniqueness stem exactly from its naïve, infantilizing character. To discuss the concepts of hope and of childhood and the relationship between them, I read in Kazuo Ishiguro's latest book -- "Klara and the Sun" (2021), using…

Language is the basis of human communication and is the most important key to complete mental development and thinking. Therefore, children must learn to communicate using appropriate language. For this to happen, the development of language in the child must be understood as a biological process, complete with internal laws and with marked stages…

Gradients across socioeconomic status occur for many children's health and improvement in high-income countries. The objective is to explore infant growth and child development in four developed countries around the socioeconomic landscape. In this paper, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) enhances the socioeconomic status gradients for the…

Over the past 50 years, scientists have made amazing discoveries about the origins of human language acquisition. Central to this field of study is the process by which infants' perceptual sensitivities gradually align with native language structure, known as "perceptual narrowing." Perceptual narrowing offers a theoretical account of…

In 'The role of play', the fifth article we are highlighting from the extensive "FORUM" archive available online, Maggie Gracie draws on material and observations she had collected during a year of study in an infant and reception class in the mid-1970s to develop ideas about the need to enable pupils to develop genuine autonomy of…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

Now in a second edition, this popular resource shows teachers and childcare providers how to work with young children based on current neuroscience research. Revised and expanded, it contains a wealth of practical and specific activities and materials to use with infants and toddlers to enhance growth and development. For each activity presented,…

A newborn arrives in this world with the inherent capacity to learn. This includes simple reflexes such as sucking, Moro reflexes, grasping etc. These "pre-installed" capacities help the baby to survive, particularly in the early months before there has been time to gaining new capabilities through learning. Once an infant starts to…

Interoception--the ability to perceive and respond to internal bodily sensations--is fundamental for the continuous regulation of physiological processes. Recently, it has been suggested that because infants depend completely on their caregivers for survival, the development of interoceptive processing emerges as a result of early dyadic…

Visual attention both guides and is guided by learning and memory systems. In this article, we use a multiple-memory systems framework to examine the interplay between attention and memory that begins in early postnatal life. We review how attention and memory interact to support infant development with respect to perceptual learning about objects…

This article focuses on the fundamental role that early childhood educators (ECEs) play in the lives of infants and very young children and their families--underscoring the power of early interactions and relationships between infant--toddler and preschool educators and the children in their programs. The authors explore the ECEs' unique roles,…

B. F. Skinner is the most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century, and it is no exaggeration to say that his discovery of operant learning (conditioning) has influenced the broader field of psychology, as well as other disciplines, including education, neuroscience, and philosophy. Skinner's discovery and elucidation of operant learning has…

Emotions remain something of a mystery for most of us even when we accept their centrality to development in general and to infancy in particular. I make 2 arguments in this paper. One: that the most crucial thing about emotions is that they allow mutuality of engagement with other emotional beings--not only evoking responses, but also provoking…

In this article, I explore two epistemologies for theorizing infancy and treating autism--infant and child psychoanalysis expounded by Frances Tustin and colleagues and developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience. I address two main issues: (a) how early psychoanalytic insights informed empirical developments and theoretical…