Research on factors underlying socioeconomic status (SES)-related inequalities in child development mainly focuses on single countries and specific influential factors. Only few studies scrutinize to what extent differences in children's early behavioural outcomes vary across countries and whether the processes that account for them are common or…

Narrative story stem techniques (NSSTs) offer insight into attachment and other representational aspects of preschool to young school aged children's inner lives. While the method moved into the academic and clinical mainstream some 35 years ago, their applicability to "non-Western" contexts remains little understood. This synthesis…

This study examines the moment-to-moment within-person associations between maternal and child behaviors during a challenging puzzle task and compares these associations between mother--child dyads from the United States (n = 99, 52 boys, M[subscript child age] = 56.05 months, SD = 6.44) and China (n = 101, 46 boys, M[subscript child age] = 57.41…

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in…

Whether high quantities of center-based care cause behavior problems is a controversial question. Studies using covariate adjustment for selection factors have detected relations between center care and behavior problems, but studies with stronger internal validity less often find such evidence. We examined whether within-child changes in hours in…

The present study compared Japanese and U.S. preschool children's knowledge of geometric shapes. The main goal was to explore if differences in shape-naming conventions in Japanese and English could explain differences in children's understanding of geometric shapes. In ancient Chinese-based languages (e.g., Japanese), all standard 2D shapes…

Are children from "Eastern" cultures less emotionally expressive and reactive than children from "Western" cultures? To answer this, we used a multi-level and multi-contextual approach to understand variations in emotion displays and cortisol reactivity among preschoolers living in China and the United States. One hundred two…

Pretend play is an important, universal activity of early childhood, but research to date contains multiple inconsistencies in definitions and measurement of pretend play. To begin to resolve this issue, we conducted a first study of the multiple different behaviors of pretend play in the preschool years (3-5 years), and investigated their…

During the preschool years, children are simultaneously undergoing a reshaping of their mental number line and becoming increasingly sensitive to the social norms expressed by those around them. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old American and Israeli children were given a task in which an experimenter laid out chips with numbers (1-5),…

Around the world, musical engagement frequently involves movement. Most adults easily clap or sway to a wide range of tempos, even without formal musical training. The link between movement and music emerges early--young infants move more rhythmically to music than speech, but do not reliably align their movements to the beat. Laboratory work…

Competency in fundamental movement skills (FMS) lays the foundation for developing more complex motor skills and supporting a physically active future. Preschool-aged children are at a crucial window of development, so intervening with motor skill programmes increases the likelihood of future physical activity (PA) participation. Parents/carers…

Picturebooks are media resources that combine illustrations and texts to reach young children with entertainment and messages about life. They can support children's development of understanding of democratic principles. For this paper, picturebooks from Sweden and the US with content involving democratic principles were analysed with the goal of…

The purpose of this study was to examine state-level early learning standards specific to physical development, including fundamental motor skills and gross motor development for preschool-aged children in the United States. All standards related to motor development and specific to children ages 3-5 years were extracted from publicly available…

The aim of this review was to systematically summarize the literature about physical education (PE) programs and their effects on preschool children's physical activity levels and motor, cognitive, and social competences. A systematic search of relevant articles was carried out using four electronic databases up until February 16, 2022. The main…

Cross-cultural differences in book sharing practices of American and Thai mother-preschooler dyads were examined. Twenty-one Thai monolingual and 21 American-English monolingual mothers and their four-year-olds completed a book sharing task. Results revealed narrative style differences between the American and Thai groups: American mothers adopted…