Reliable and valid assessment of parenting and child behaviors is critical for clinicians and researchers alike, and observational measures of parenting behaviors are often considered the gold standard for assessing parenting and parent-child interaction quality. The current study sought to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Coder…

Children with autism spectrum disorder benefit from early, intensive interventions to improve social communication, and parent-implemented interventions are a feasible, family-centered way to increase treatment dosage. The success of such interventions is dependent on a parent's ability to implement the strategies with fidelity. However,…

Moral justifications work, when they do, by invoking values that are shared in the common ground of the interlocutors. We asked 3- and 5-year-old peer dyads (N = 144) to identify and punish norm transgressors. In the moral condition, the transgressor violated a moral norm (e.g., by stealing); in the social rules condition, she/he violated a…

The present study assessed concordance between child reported and adult observed strategies to depict single and mixed emotion in the same human figure drawings. 205 children (104 boys, 101 girls) aged 6 years 2 months to 8 years 3 months formed two age groups (6 years 2 months-7 years 2 months and 7 years 3 months-8 years 3 months) across two…

The aim of this study was to investigate kindergartners' exploration of interactive causality during their play with a pair of toy sound blocks. Interactive causality refers to a type of causal pattern in which two entities interact to produce a causal force, as in particle attraction and symbiotic relationships. Despite being prevalent in nature,…

Poor sleep is thought to interfere with children's learning and academic achievement (AA). However, existing research and theory indicate there are factors that may mitigate the academic risk associated with poor sleep. The purpose of this study was to examine the moderating role of children's effortful control (EC) on the relation between sleep…

This article reports on research examining the social purposes of Indigenous kindergarten children's language and their construction of Indigenous cultural knowledge within and through interactions with peers during dramatic play and play with construction materials. The participants are three teachers and 29 children from two rural northern…

This paper investigates young children's exploratory play and inquiry on playscapes: playgrounds specifically designed to connect children with natural environments. Our theoretical framework posits that playscapes combine the benefits of nature and play to promote informal science exploration of natural materials. This, in turn, is expected to…

Although, collectively, results of earlier direct observation studies suggest momentary time sampling (MTS) may offer certain technical advantages over whole-interval (WIR) and partial-interval (PIR) recording, no study has compared these methods for measuring engagement in young children in naturalistic environments. This study compared direct…

Many studies have shown that children with autism spectrum disorder have some understanding of intentions behind others' goal-directed actions on objects. It is not clear whether they understand intentions at a high level of abstraction reliant on the context in which the actions occur. This study tested their understanding of others' prior…

Due to the uneven gender ratio of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), girls are rarely studied independently from boys. Research focusing on restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) indicates that above the age of six girls have fewer and/or different RRBs than boys with ASD. In this study we investigated whether girls and boys with ASD…

In this observational study, male and female professional caregivers' (n = 42) levels of sensitivity and stimulation toward three-year-old children (n = 42) were observed in a semi-structured play situation. Further, sex roles of male and female caregivers were examined with the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). Male and female caregivers showed the…

Given that maternal support promotes healthy social and emotional development in early childhood, it is important to understand the predictors of such support, especially during emotional challenges. In this study, mothers' dispositional distress reactivity (i.e., the tendency toward experiencing distress in response to children's negative…

This article describes a study on mutuality in mother-child interaction during reading and playing sessions. Within mother-child interaction, mutuality is seen as important in language acquisition. The study was executed within a group of Netherlands Antillean mother-child dyads who participated in an intervention programme. Mutuality was…

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent-child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents' explanations about those events and children's possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses…