Early intervention activities for very young disabled children are frequently linked to developmental targets and goals. A key challenge for parents and practitioners involved in early intervention programmes is to encourage their child to play and develop creatively through enjoyable, everyday childhood experiences. This paper reports on a…

This article offers a conceptual framework for assessing PJ Library programming grounded in the relevant scholarly literature and illustrated by way of conversations with PJ Library parents. It is built around three themes concerning how parents view their role as facilitators in their child's religious and cultural identity formation through the…

Publicly funded prekindergarten programs have achieved small-to-large impacts on children's cognitive outcomes. The current study examined the impact of a prekindergarten program that implemented a coaching system and consistent literacy, language, and mathematics curricula on these and other nontargeted, essential components of school readiness,…

Although some evidence indicates that even very young children engage in rudimentary forms of strategic behavior, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. This study tested the hypothesis that uncertainty monitoring underlies such behaviors. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children ("N" = 88) completed a perceptual…

Child hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) activity was investigated as a moderator of parental depressive symptom effects on child behavior in an adoption sample ("n" = 210 families). Adoptive parents' depressive symptoms and child internalizing and externalizing were assessed at 18, 27, and 54 months, and child morning and evening HPA…

A latent profile analysis approach was used to examine the developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills in Grades 1 and 2, as well as their antecedents in kindergarten. The participants in this study were 448 children. Four different developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills were identified. Our…

The present investigation explored (1) fathers' contributions to children's theory of mind (ToM) development, (2) the similarity between maternal and paternal mind-mindedness (MM) in relation to children's ToM, and (3) the relative predictive strength of two concurrently administered measures of MM (an online and an interview assessment) in…

This study examined the developmental pathways from maternal behavior to school readiness within a sample of 1007 children, with a specific focus on the mediating role of delay of gratification (DoG). Maternal behavior across the first 36 months of age was explored as a predictor of children's DoG at 54 months as well as their behavioral and…

This study was designed to examine the cultural sensitivity of the PDMS-2 for Portuguese preschool children aged 36-71 months. A total of 540 children (255 males and 285 females) from 15 public preschools of Viana do Castelo, Portugal, were assessed. Age and gender effects in motor performance were examined. Results indicated that PDMS-2 is valid…

A series of studies investigated White U.S. 3- and 4-year-old children's use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others’ relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which…

This dissertation looks at the nature of creativity and what it takes to create a creative environment between the home environment and the elementary classrooms. Children make meaning best through play, creativity and problem-solving; this theory is built on Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (1978) alongside schema theory and Sternberg…

Children experience chronic stress in ways that can impair their brain functioning and overall development. This article articulates the unique needs of children experiencing chronic stress and discusses strategies that families and schools can use to support and strengthen children's development across the social, emotional, and cognitive domains.

We evaluated social anxiety (SA) symptoms in parents of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs; N = 131) and community parents (N = 597) using the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI). SA was significantly more common in ASD than control mothers (15.6 vs. 6.7 %) and more equal between the ASD and control fathers (3.3 vs. 4.8 %). The…

A developmental cascade model for adolescent substance use beginning in infancy was examined in a sample of children with alcoholic and nonalcoholic parents. The model examined the role of parents' alcohol diagnoses, depression and antisocial behavior in a cascading process of risk via 3 major hypothesized pathways: first, via parental…

Research Findings: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of linguistic training based on the use of the Drežancic method in educational settings. It is hypothesized that characteristics of this method, based on the typical stages of linguistic and cognitive development, could influence both language competence and executive function (EF). A…