School readiness is a topic of great interest to early childhood and maternal child health initiatives, such as the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programme. However, there is a lack of information about best practices or strategies in home visiting and their relative effectiveness in improving school readiness,…

Children's fuzziness leads to increased variance in the data, data loss, and high dropout rates in developmental studies. This study investigated the importance of 20 factors on the person (child, caregiver, experimenter) and situation (task, method, time, and date) level for the data quality as indicated via the number of valid trials in 11…

Background: This article emerged from a larger qualitative study, which revealed that children continue to be exposed to a complex range of risk factors with devastating consequences for their well-being. Gaps in services further hinder their development. The study concluded that there is a need for multidisciplinary teams to implement an early…

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in many contexts. There is limited scholarship, however, in the fields of Developmental Psychology and Early Childhood Education exploring the implications of generative AI for babies and young children. In this Perspectives piece, we discuss potential use cases,…

The influences in a child's developmental environment, both positive and negative, interact to shape the development of their brain, the integrated systems in their body--including the immune, metabolic, and cardiovascular systems--and even how their genes are expressed. Clean air is an essential part of a healthy developmental environment, and…

Objective: In preterm and very low birth weight (VLBW) infants, attention-related problems have been found to be more pronounced and emerge later as academic difficulties that may persist into school age. In response, based on three attention networks: alerting, orienting, and executive attention, we examined the development of attention functions…

This paper reports on a study that explores how artists might best support very young children's engagement in integrated arts performances. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which artists work with very young children in performing arts spaces. The study was designed to intimately examine a work with and for a very…

Identifying the neural processes that underlie the association between children's early adverse experiences and cognitive development could inform more effective intervention strategies. The goal of the current study (data collected 2015-2021) was to examine relations among early experiences at 6 months, electroencephalography (EEG) theta power at…

Research Findings: Social constructivist theories have proposed that caregivers' perceptions of children as morally responsible agents are an important factor in children's moral development. However, there is substantial variance in caregivers' ascriptions of moral agency to young children. The present study examined caregiver social conformity…

This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of a designed training program for nurses toward early detection of developmental disabilities among children aged 0-3 years. A group of 21 licensed nurses with professional experience ranging from 5-11 years participated in the study. The participants completed the measurements to evaluate their…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with adults provide evidence that functional brain networks, including the default mode network and frontoparietal network, underlie executive functioning (EF). However, given the challenges of using fMRI with infants and young children, little work has assessed the developmental trajectories of…

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education is essential to the economic growth, health, and progress of the modern world. One cognitive ability that underpins thinking and learning in STEM, as well as other disciplines, is relational ability. This ability to spot common relations shared by different objects, events, ideas, or…

It has long been known that children who grow up in situations of economic and social disadvantage tend to have more difficulties when they enter school, and that these are often perpetuated, leading to underachievement and disaffection. The role of the family and home environment in stimulating children's language acquisition and pre-literacy…

The literature has yet to review the differential effects of Natural Environment Teaching (NET) and Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT) on adaptive skills. A sample of 142 children diagnosed with ASD between the ages of 16 and 35 months received either DTT, NET, or both interventions (NET+ DTT). The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (BSID)…

Purpose: Assessing early language skills through parental report is a cost-effective way to screen for language delays when resources are scarce. A pan-Arabic lexeme approach was tested by extending the Egyptian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) to Jordan and Palestine in infants aged 8-30 months (Arabic…