Research Findings: This study examined the transactional nature of harsh parenting and emotion regulation across toddlerhood, including the moderating role of teacher sensitivity in child care. Secondary data analyses were conducted with a subsample of families from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project who participated in…

Research Findings: The present cross-sectional study investigated the question of whether 6 different temperament dimensions (inhibition to novelty, social orientation, motor activity, positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and attention) influenced cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM) in 168 children (86 three/four-year-olds and 82…

Outcomes of studies with exclusively or predominantly female caregivers suggest that boys in child care are involved with interactions, attachment relationships, and care of lower quality than girls. We investigated to what extent child gender (N = 38, 19 boys) and caregiver gender (N = 38, 19 males) is associated with child-caregiver interactions…

Research Findings: The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of individual and situational factors on nursery school children's conflict management strategies. This observational study of triadic interaction was carried out among 69 children whose mean age was 48 months. The video-recorded data were coded for the type of…

Practice and Policy: The preschool years represent a critical time to foster family engagement in education for children growing up in poverty. Yet the ways in which Latino families with lower levels of income engage with their children's education at home and at school might look different from how middle-income parents from the dominant U.S.…

Research Findings: The present study investigated the social and cognitive precursors of vocabulary knowledge in 239 Turkish preschoolers both concurrently (Time 1 [T1] Mage = 53.29 months, SD = 10.19) and subsequently 1 year later (Time 2 [T2] Mage = 65.40 months, SD = 10.55). We examined the role of parenting behaviors by focusing on emotional…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine differences in the development of conflict management strategies, focusing on 3- and 5-year-olds, through a comparison of 3 neighboring Asian cultures, those of China (n = 114), Japan (n = 98), and Korea (n = 90). The dual concern model of conflict management was adopted to probe which…

Research Findings: Evolution by natural selection is often relegated to the high school curriculum on the assumption that younger students cannot grasp its complexity. We sought to test that assumption by teaching children ages 4-12 (n = 96) a selection-based explanation for biological adaptation and comparing their success to that of adults…

Research Findings: The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between social play and involvement in the outdoor preschool environment. The study included 173 children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years (M[subscript age] = 3.95, SD = 0.82) and attending 19 preschools in the Basque Country (Spain). A total of 51 teachers…

Research Findings: In order to examine the explanatory power of behavioral self-regulation in the domain of emotion knowledge, especially in a non-U.S. culture, 365 German 4- and 5-year-olds were individually tested on these constructs. Path analyses revealed that children's behavioral self-regulation explained their emotion knowledge in the…

Research Findings: The present study investigated the role of ethnic similarity in the peer preferences and play quality of Latino and Chinese children enrolled in Head Start classrooms and the relationship between peer acceptance and social adjustment in these groups. Participants were 244 children (M = 4.6 years old) from Head Start preschools…

Children's social competence and behavioral adjustment are key issues for child development, education, and clinical research. Cross-cultural analyses are necessary to provide relevant methods of assessing them for cross-cultural research. The aim of the current study was to contribute to this important line of research by validating the 3-factor…

Research Findings: Self-regulation in young children predicts later social adjustment and academic success across cultural contexts. Therefore, it is crucial to identify factors that promote or inhibit behavioral self-regulation skills. In this study, we focus on gender and socioeconomic status (SES; parental education and income) as possible…

Research Findings: This study examined associations between the expressive vocabulary of classroom peers and children's own vocabulary knowledge using conceptual scoring in a linguistically diverse sample of 4-year-olds who attended universal preschool programs in a metropolitan area. Higher peer conceptually scored expressive vocabulary was…

This study investigates social and ethnic differences in the use of early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers with different learning environments in an ECEC system with universal state-subsidized provision and low fees. Based on the German National Educational Panel Study-Kindergarten Cohort from 2011, we matched data on 587 groups in 253…