Young children's misbehaviours can be challenging to interpret, evaluate, and intervene on. In turn, adults' interventions on children's transgressions inform children about how others view their actions. In the current research, we examined adult responses to recordings of everyday transgressions committed by young children. This research adopted…

Early temperament predicts various aspects of development. In large-scale studies, temperament is often assessed via parental report because naturalistic and structured observations are costly and bear the risk of subject loss. However, the validity of such parental reports has been disputed repeatedly. This article compared parental reports on…

Research has shown that young children's socio-emotional development may benefit from participating in a music programme. In this study, we explored the association between participation in a general music programme and the development of socio-emotional skills in relation to the duration of the programme. Children aged 4 and 5 (N=50), from a low…

Caregivers' warm, sensitive, and attentive interactions with their children have been widely considered key indicators of infant-caregiver interaction quality in childcare contexts. The primary purpose of this study was to explore infant's daily experiences and the characteristics of relationship-based supportive care practices in a childcare…

This single case study was undertaken to explore how an infant head teacher meets the needs of the infants, who express their desire to be cared for, in their caring encounters. Natural daily interactions between infants and the teacher were observed for approximately 10 weeks. Through the qualitative data analysis, the results of this study…

Historically underpinning principles of the English curriculum framework for children from birth to five years explicitly acknowledged a spiritual dimension to children's uniqueness and well-being. Yet spirituality receives scant reference in the discourse of creative learning and teaching. This paper considers the relationship of spirituality to…

"Exploration" is recognised as research behaviour; anecdotally, as an early years' teacher, I witnessed many young children exploring. However, young children's self-initiated explorations are rarely regarded as research by adult researchers and policy-makers. The exclusion of young children's autonomous explorations from recognition as…

One of the outcomes of the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, "Te Whariki", is "working theories". Prior research on this concept has primarily utilised sociocultural theoretical underpinnings and neglected Piagetian constructivist theories. This paper explores ways the Piagetian concepts of equilibrium and disequilibrium…

The present study utilised naturalistic observation to assess the impact of parental departure during daily drop-off at preschool on children's settling into daily preschool routines. Forty-six 3-5-year-old children and their parents/caregivers were observed during morning drop-off at preschool. Longer latencies of parent/caregiver leaving were…

This study explores preschool children's outdoor play preferences. The sample was 40 (20 male, 20 female) primarily European-American three and four year olds. Data were collected via naturalistic observation and analyzed using repeated measures ANOVAs and MANOVAs. The independent variable was sex of child; dependent variable was play space…

In this study, we showed that it is feasible to employ observational methods in description of social status; thereby allowing inclusion of children with insufficient cognitive ability to make valid judgement of social role, and evading the validity issues concerning teacher and parent report. We observed presence on social arenas and social…

The quality of care offered in four different types of non-parental child care to 307 infants at 10 months old and 331 infants at 18 months old was compared and factors associated with higher quality were identified. Observed quality was lowest in nurseries at each age point, except that at 18 months they offered more learning activities. There…

To examine the antecedents and consequences of social comparison exchanges of preschool children, this paper describes and analyzes several examples of such behavior. Data provide variegated descriptions of the social components of comparison behaviors in naturally occurring classroom contexts. (Author/RH)

Examines various situations in which young children use social comparison to elicit understanding from a peer. Data are drawn from naturalistic observations of three- , four- , and five-year-olds. Children used social comparison to seek information, agreement, permission, compliance, verbal responsiveness, and attention. (Author/RH)

Compared direction and purpose of touch, type, body area touched, and responses to touch for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers observed in early childhood classrooms. Found that infants received more touch than older children. Touch involving "vulnerable body parts" and negative responses occurred more often among toddlers than…