Objective: The aim of this study was to identify broad overarching feeding styles that parents may use and their effects on pre-school-aged children's healthy and unhealthy snack intake. Design: Cross sectional study Methods: Mothers (n = 611) of children aged 2-7 years (mean age 3.9 years) completed an online survey assessing parent-feeding…

The study analyzed the factorial and concurrent validity of the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) using an exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) approach. Participants were 368 Italian children aged 3 to 6 (M = 4.60, SD = 0.98). The three-factor ESEM solution fit the data better than the classical confirmatory factor analysis…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate bidirectional associations between peer acceptance and both emotion and effortful control during kindergarten (N = 301). In both the fall and spring semesters, we obtained peer nominations of acceptance, measures of positive and negative emotion based on naturalistic observations in school (i.e., classroom,…

Drawing on the framework of social domain theory, this multi-method, multi-informant longitudinal study examined whether callous-unemotional (CU) tendencies moderated the association between U.S. 4 to 7 year olds' (n = 135; M[subscript age] = 5.65, 50% male; 75% White) ability to differentiate hypothetical, prototypical moral and conventional…

Background: "Food fussiness" (FF) is the tendency to be highly selective about which foods one is willing to eat, and emerges in early childhood; "food neophobia" (FN) is a closely related characteristic but specifically refers to rejection of unfamiliar food. These behaviors are associated, but the extent to which their…

Research Findings: Using data from 3,250 participants in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, we used structural equation modeling to investigate whether family routines (e.g., bedtime routine, reading routine) established in preschool predict children's school readiness (i.e., academic skills, social-emotional skills, and…

There is a growing body of evidence linking childhood exposure to environmental toxins and a range of adverse health outcomes, including preterm birth, cognitive deficits, and cancer. Little is known, however, about what drives mothers to engage in health behaviors to reduce such risks. Guided by the integrative model of behavioral prediction,…

The aims of this study were (1) to understand the effects of parents' education and personality aspects on child disruptive behavior, (2) to know the correlation between the parents' personality aspects (N-Deference, N-Succorance, N-Dominance and N-Aggression) and the children' disruptive behavior. A quantitative approach to the correlational…

Young children's temperament was examined as a potential predictor of early adolescent school engagement, with elementary school teacher-child and peer relationships included as potential mediators of these effects. A large national longitudinal dataset (N = 1,032) was used to estimate structural equations models that showed children's social…

In a series of 4 experiments, we tested children's understanding that the causes of their actions must necessarily be attributed to information known prior to (i.e., "pre-action" information), rather than after (i.e., "post-action" information), the completion of their actions. For example, children were shown a dog, asked…

Building on social-cognitive theory and the expectancy-value theory, this study indicated that early parent expectations for children’s post-secondary educational attainment have a stronger effect on 8th-grade achievement than home-based parental involvement. With a nationally representative sample of kindergarten students and their parents in the…

Children who are physically disciplined are at elevated risk for externalizing problems. Conversely, maternal reasoning and reminding of rules, or inductive discipline, is associated with fewer child externalizing problems. Few studies have simultaneously examined bidirectional associations between these forms of discipline and child adjustment…

The study analyzed the conversational exchanges through which child tutors mediated literacy abilities and knowledge with young children in the framework of the project "From Child to Child: A Tutor-Child Literacy Program," that is being conducted in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The analysis considered the conversational moves deployed by…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

Nonlinear growth curves or growth curves that follow a specified nonlinear function in time enable researchers to model complex developmental patterns with parameters that are easily interpretable. In this article we describe how a variety of sigmoid curves can be fit using the M"plus" structural modeling program and the nonlinear…