Mature social evaluations privilege agents' intentions over the outcomes of their actions, but young children often privilege outcomes over intentions in verbal tasks probing their social evaluations. In three experiments (N = 118), we probed the development of intention-based social evaluation and mental state reasoning using nonverbal methods…

This article focuses on child participation in early childhood education (ECE). The theoretical basis for this study is a relational approach that highlights the significance of spatiality and materiality. Drawing from these theoretical perspectives, child participation is understood as a space that children actively do in various combinations of…

Learning about actions requires children to identify the boundaries of an action and its units. Whereas some action units are easily identified, parents can support children's action learning by adjusting the presentation and using social signals. However, currently, little is understood regarding how children use these signals to learn actions.…

Pretend play is important for children's development. However, recent research indicates that, as preschool children age and get more proficient at pretend play, they prefer real objects. We examined whether toddlers prefer real objects when they are younger as well as when they are older and more proficient in pretend play situations. Forty-three…

Children learn to perform actions on artifacts in their environments from infancy, but the ways caregivers support this learning during everyday interactions are relatively unexplored. This study investigated how naturalistic caregiver-child teaching interactions promoted conventional action learning in toddlers. Caregivers of 32 24- to…

Look at your baby or toddler. They are still learning to eat from a spoon, roll over, stack blocks, walk a few steps, or say their first words. It's hard to imagine that even in these early years, young children are being shaped by the biases that surround them in the world. This is why parenting for social justice begins at birth. Get started…

Bagless intervention is a term used by professionals to describe early intervention (EI) services in which the provider refrains from bringing a bag of toys into the home for sessions. Instead of using a toy bag to work on child outcomes, the service provider uses materials in the child's home, as well as family routines, to address the…

This article explores conflicts among toddlers in kindergarten and the impact of toys in these conflicts. The author describes these interactions as part of how children develop and express their citizenship, and argues that staff members should hesitate before interfering with rules in order to prevent such conflicts. This is based on Mouffe's…

Communication is best understood as occurring along three dimensions: interactional, conceptual, and linguistic. However, few studies have examined early parent-child communication along all three dimensions simultaneously. This study examines these three dimensions of communication in Norwegian parent-child interactions during play. Thirty-nine…

An expansive view of care is vital to understanding children's sense-making of their care experiences in early childhood education. Yet, scant literature explores how toddlers enact and express understandings of care in their play with objects and others. This article identifies play situations where toddlers enact and express understandings, and…

Fifty-one 23-to-55-month-old-infants faced two apparatuses that required the use of a rigid (box apparatus) or flexible (hose apparatus) stick-like tool to retrieve a toy stuck inside. Before attempting the extraction, however, they had to pick the only one tool (of three) on display that had the appropriate rigidity/flexibility to be effective.…

Learning to walk leads to an increase in language abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms accounting for this relation remain unclear. Investigating the quality of early gait control may offer some insights. The purpose of this study was to: (1) quantify how 13-month-olds (n = 39; 39% male) and 24-month-olds (n = 39; 59% male) adapt gait…

Engaging, focusing, and persisting in the completion of tasks are among the skills needed for school success. Tracking whether a child is learning cognitive problem-solving skills is essential in knowing if they are acquiring skills important for development and school readiness; and if not, how they are responding to early intervention. Use of…

This article presents results from a large-scale Norwegian study that examines the quality of early childhood education and care, using the research tool ITERS-R. Although ITERS-R consists of 39 items, this article focuses solely on results within music education in Item 18. Music and movement. According to ITERS-R, results from 206 toddler day…

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book…