Being school-ready when transitioning to the primary school system has been associated with favourable outcomes during schooling and adult life. While children living in socio-economically disadvantaged areas may be at a higher risk of being less school-ready, research in the area has highlighted that not all children experience such a delay. This…

We tested a culturally integrative model examining the associations among economic hardship during infancy and Latino children's later sociobehavioral problems and academic skills prior to kindergarten entry, whether mothers' mental health problems and positive parenting behaviors mediated those associations, and whether they varied by mothers'…

Psychologists have long debated the role of early experience in social and cognitive development. However, traditional approaches to studying this issue are not well positioned to address this debate. The authors present simulations that indicate that the associations between early experiences and later outcomes should approach different…

In keeping with proposals emphasizing the role of early experience in infant brain development, this study investigated the prospective links between quality of parent-infant interactions and subsequent child executive functioning (EF), including working memory, impulse control, and set shifting. Maternal sensitivity, mind-mindedness and autonomy…

Mothers read stories to their children (N = 41) aged between 3.3 years and 5.11 years old, and children then completed two false-belief tasks. One year later, mothers read a story to 37 of those children who were also given four tasks to assess their advanced understanding of mental states. Mothers' early use of cognitive verbs in picture-book…

Deals with some of the important relations between mother and environmental factors in their effects on an infant somatic and behavioral development. (Author/JM)

This paper reports the effects of one hour of extra post-partum contact between mother and infant on the quality of the attachment observed when the infant was one year old. It was hypothesized that infants in the extra contact condition would be classified as securely attached while regular contact infants would be less frequently classified as…

The rate and nature of mother-child interaction - verbal and nonverbal- and its effects are here discussed and recent research is presented and analyzed. (Editor/JB)

Does early child care hinder or enhance infants' and toddlers' social and cognitive development? This longitudinal study investigated whether: (1) child care is related to qualities of mother-child interaction and the child's cognitive and language development in the first 3 years of life; (2) the child care environment interacts with the home…

Videotaped 14 mother-infant dyads during book sharing to examine categories of information mothers provided when talking about the book. Found a substantial amount of discussion about the books. Mothers modeled information structures of varying levels of cognitive demand, most frequently modeling the simplest of labeling pictures, with decreasing…

This study examined the effectiveness of a training program designed to help disadvantaged teenage mothers promote their infants' early cognitive development. Subjects were 127 mothers whose babies were less than 6 months old at the start of the program; most were white women near the poverty level, and many were unmarried. The control group…

Activities of the Institute for Development of Human Resources provide the information contained in this document. This first large-scale project of the institute was in parent education of disadvantaged mothers in the north central Florida area. The purpose of the project was to investigate a way in which early intervention into the lives of…

Assessed effects of maternal employment on infants with mothers working 20 or more hours per week or fewer than 20 hours per week. Found that neither differences in maternal employment during child's first year, nor child's entry into nonmaternal care before age one, predicted differences in cognitive and socioemotional development at ages two and…

Studied partner and site novelty for mother-infant, stranger-infant, and mother-stranger face-to-face interactions. Found that adult-infant vocal timing measures at age 4 months did predict attachment and cognition at age 12 months. Comparison of mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions suggested the dynamics of infants' early…

Long-term correlates of early child care and maternal employment were examined in a representative sample of 333 middle-class children ages 6 through 12. The results indicated that, for most middle-class children, early child care experiences had few, if any, lasting substantial influences when the concurrent contribution of family and child…