Several major goals of early childhood professionals are to help children learn to work with others, care for others, verbalize feelings, support friends, show kindness and exhibit other character skills and traits. When these life skills are lacking, it affects the ways in which children interact with one another and form relationships with peers…

Concurrent and longitudinal relations among parental emotional expressivity, children's sympathy and children's prosocial behavior were assessed with correlations and structural equation modeling when the children were 55-97 months old (N = 214; M age = 73 months, SD = 9.59) and eight years later (N = 130; ages 150-195 months old, M = 171 months,…

Saida, a 16-year-old girl in Bermuda, attended a special alternative high school program for students with serious behavior problems. She had been receiving special education for her behavioral problems since the age of 5. Saida regularly used profanity in response to teacher directives, particularly in social studies class. A functional…

The authors propose a heuristic model of the social outcomes of childhood brain disorder that draws on models and methods from both the emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience and the study of social competence in developmental psychology/psychopathology. The heuristic model characterizes the relationships between social adjustment, peer…

Popular media such as films, television programmes/commercials and magazines have become the dominant source through which children learn about others and their world, develop attitudes and beliefs as manifested in media expressions, and formulate their sense of identity. Popular media have enormous influence on children who are constantly…

The purpose of this study was to document whether adolescents make inferences regarding male and female vignette characters in terms of the characters' sexuality, social skills, impairment, and aggressiveness when the characters consume alcohol. A Web-based survey of 1,691 middle and high school students (grades 6-11) from diverse socioeconomic…

This study explored preschool teachers' beliefs about the appropriateness of early literacy and mathematics education. In all, 60 teachers of 4-year-olds, half working with low-socioeconomic status (SES) children at publicly funded preschools and the other half with middle-SES children at private preschools, were randomly assigned to read either…

Social avoidance is a core phenotypic characteristic of fragile X syndrome (FXS) that has critical cognitive and social consequences. However, no study has examined modulation of multiple social avoidant behaviors in children with FXS. In the current study, we introduce the "Social Approach Scale" (SAS), an observation scale that includes physical…

This case study is a continuation of a research project that investigated 149 mentoring teams in four school districts over a two-year period. The primary goal in the first phase of the study was to identify mentoring teams that were regularly encountering problems, introduce intervention procedures, and assess the effectiveness of those…

Effective social communication interventions achieve 2 outcomes: enhancement of language and social skills and generalization of these skills during authentic interactions with peers. This article describes intervention contexts and strategies for promoting generalization of social communication skills in children with language impairments.…

The best childhood predictor of later adult adaptation is the adequacy with which a child gets along with other children. Because social development begins in the early years, it is appropriate that early childhood programs include regular formal and informal assessment of children's acquisition of social competence. This digest presents the…

This article discusses key issues of literacy that are important to both teachers and learners for understanding, and summarizes the function of literacy in three different groups: primary education, adult education, and communities with unwritten languages. The article investigates the scope of literacy, showing how this concept may be defined…

Today's school children often come from homes that are dramatically different from those of 25 years ago. To help this new generation of students, many schools have developed advisor/advisee programs; tips on how a school can start such a program are covered in this booklet. Its main purpose is to outline the basic features of a successful program…

Recently, within the field of early childhood education, there has been an increasing emphasis on the role of social construction of knowledge and on the inter-relatedness of aspects of social and cognitive development. This study investigated a proposed relationship between young children's popularity status among peers and a representational…

An important and well-documented finding in the peer relations literature is that there is an association between children's peer relations and their later social development. Two models have been proposed for the predictive link between early peer relations and later adjustment: incidental and causal. Although findings have supported an…