Emotion regulation is one of the important skills helping children and parents to deal with stressful conditions within the family context during the pandemic. We aimed to investigate whether mothers' emotion regulation strategies before COVID-19 and their COVID-19-related anxiety would predict children's sadness regulation during the pandemic…

Organized sports are among the most common youth activities in the United States, and athletic coaches can often become important mentors to their players. Nonetheless, few studies have examined the characteristics of youth who form mentoring relationships with coaches and whether such relationships are associated with later academic outcomes.…

Unlike organized activities such as sports and arts, civic activities in adolescence (e.g., volunteering, student government) have been less studied in relation to school success and almost all existing evidence consists of cross-sectional findings. In a longitudinal study, 1035 pupils (64% females, 20% nonwhite, M[subscript age] = 14.21 years)…

Overweight youth are often socially marginalized and have fewer friends than their nonoverweight peers. Participation in organized activities may be one way to promote friendships for overweight youth. In this study, we used a large nationally representative sample to test whether two aspects of participation promoted friendships, namely the…

Current knowledge of intraindividual longitudinal patterns of civic participation (CP) and their predictors remains limited. As life cycle trends are showing a decline in civic/political involvement during early adulthood years, increased understanding of these aspects could enhance efforts to promote greater and/or sustained CP trajectories among…

In the United States a "civic engagement gap" persists between low-income youth and their higher-income counterparts. To examine the developmental origins of civic engagement in a sample of U.S. children growing up in poverty, a conceptual model was tested employing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class (ECLS-K)…

This article compares regression modeling and propensity score analysis as different types of statistical techniques used in addressing selection bias when estimating the impact of two-year versus one-year Head Start on children's school readiness. The analyses were based on the national Head Start secondary dataset. After controlling for…

Ethnic and generational differences in motivation and achievement have been well-established. However, minimal research has examined the role of social factors on educational outcomes among individuals from diverse backgrounds. With a longitudinal sample of 408 Latino, Asian, and European-American students, we examine family, discrimination, and…

Social skills function as a vehicle by which we negotiate important relationships and navigate the transition from childhood into the educational and professional experiences of early adulthood. Yet, for individuals who are deaf, access to these opportunities may vary depending on their preferred language modality, family language use, and…

Children's social skills are an important class of learned behaviors that facilitate success in the classroom; the primary method used in the assessment of social skills involves having parents or teachers complete standardized checklists using judgments of frequency or intensity. Children's (N = 1,102) social skills were modeled as time-varying…

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…

The present longitudinal study employed two distinctive approaches (variable-oriented and person-oriented) to examine low-income children's academic and social functioning across the important transition from pre-k to first grade. Participants included 152 former urban Head Start children. Variable-oriented and person-oriented approaches were…

Civic engagement was studied in relation to overall development in adolescence, emerging adulthood, and young adulthood to examine how earlier activity involvement and success in prior and concurrent age-salient domains of competence may contribute to 2 forms of civic engagement in adulthood (citizenship and volunteering). Data on 163 youth were…

This study applied individual growth trajectory analyses and person-oriented analysis to identify common profiles of out-of-school activity engagement trajectories among racially and ethnically diverse inner city teens (N = 1,430). On average, teens exhibited declining trajectories of participation in school-based and team sports activities and…

This longitudinal study examines the effects of exposure to the terrorist attack of September 11th as well as exposure to other forms of community violence on change in the mental health and social attitudes of youths in New York City. Three quarters of the youths reported some form of direct exposure to the events of September 11th, and 80%…