I watch my eighteen-month old daughter talking to the soft-bodied doll that I have made her. I wonder what she sees in the undefined cloth face. I wonder if she will make a similar doll for her child one day and I wonder if she will wonder as I do. While the repetition across generations of early childhood experience is both common sense and much…

Educators and educational theorists frequently employ a gardening metaphor to capture several child-centred principles about teaching and children, i.e. teachers must respect a child's unique interests and abilities, recognise what is developmentally appropriate for students, and resist pursuing a narrow set of outcomes. Historically, however,…

Contemporary children are growing up in a post-typographic era, where mobile electronic devices and digital texts are increasingly present. For parents and educators, shifts into new digital practices and new text forms can create a sense of uncertainty. In response to parent and teacher interest, popular media have frequently focused on topics…

This article explores parents' perspectives of children's learning, drawing on a comparative research project with a focus on survey data from 200 preschool parents in Japan and China. The findings were compared between the two countries in order to identify common and distinct perspectives in terms of what and how children learn in the families…

This article identifies how parenting, culture, and education of ethnically diverse children influence their development and learning outcomes. As U.S. communities become more ethnically diverse, it is critical for educators, practitioners, researchers, and policy leaders to have an ideological and pedagogical understanding of how to maximize the…

Mediational analyses were conducted with data from two small randomized control trials of the Responsive Teaching (RT) parent-mediated developmental intervention which used nearly identical intervention and control procedures. The purpose of these analyses was to determine whether or how the changes in maternal responsiveness and children's…

Rogoff (2003) argues that "Human development is a cultural process….People develop as participants in cultural communities" (p. 3). Children develop within families, and different cultures reflect differences in how they structure activity for this development. For example, middle class North American families generally would not permit…

Families often use music as a way to teach children how to behave according to the precepts of society. Beginning in infancy, musicality exists at the core of family interactions and forms the basis for social and emotional communication throughout the life span. For many families, musical parenting practices permeate daily life, facilitating…

Interpersonal, familial, and situational risk factors that predict young children's aggression and non-compliance are explored. Here examples of specific techniques and provided to help teachers and parents effectively support children's early development of cooperative and prosocial behaviours as well as problem-solving skills in family and…

This study examined the effects of mothers' style of interaction on children's interactive engagement. The study consisted of a sample of 30 children from Korea, including chronologically age-matched groups of children with disabilities (n = 13) and children without disabilities (n = 17). Parents were videotaped while playing with their children…

This article describes the positive outcomes from the Philadelphia-based Educating Children for Parenting (ECP) program, founded in 1978, which aims to take advantage of children's fascination with babies and their easily triggered emotional investment in learning how to care for them. The program brings a parent and infant into the classroom…

This paper questions the widely held assumption that acquiring knowledge of child development is an essential part of teacher preparation and teaching competence, especially among teachers of young children. After discussing the influence of culture, parenting style, and teaching style on developmental expectations and outcomes, the paper asserts…