Mind-mindedness (MM), the parent's propensity to treat their young child as an individual with a mind of their own, has repeatedly been found to be positively associated with subsequent child development outcomes. In the current Swedish study, the first aim was to investigate the main features of MM in this cultural context and the second aim was…

"Working Well with Babies" describes the comprehensive competencies (including the knowledge, dispositions, and skills) that educators of infants and toddlers must have to provide optimal support for infants and toddlers. Designed as a learning resource for both in-service and pre-service infant/toddler practitioners, this text details…

Preterm birth (<37 gestational weeks) is associated with long-term risks for health and neurodevelopment, but recently, studies have also started exploring how preterm birth affects early language development in the 1st year of life. Because the timing and quality of auditory and visual input is very different for preterm versus full-term…

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they…

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)…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been found to be beneficial for the development of children below three years. However, many children do not attend ECEC facilities. Frequently, structural family characteristics (SFC), such as migration background, educational attainment and income, are used to explain differing probabilities of…

Infants with Down syndrome are more likely to experience feeding problems and mothers are likely to require more feeding support than mothers of typically developing infants. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many feeding support services changed from face-to-face to online, which impacted some maternal feeding experiences negatively, but no studies…

Sense enables babies to perceive the physical and chemical changes that occur in the external environment. It occurs as a result of the dynamic interaction of sensory stimuli with sensory receptors in the eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin. The stimuli that newborns see, touch, and hear affect their brain development. The brain develops faster in…

Background: Children with motor delays are at increased risk for delayed means-end problem-solving (MEPS) performance. Objectives: To evaluate children with motor delays: 1) the impact of motor delay severity and MEPS mastery timing on developmental trajectories of MEPS; and 2) the effectiveness of Sitting Together And Reaching To Play…

This study investigates the reasons behind the decision to send children aged under three to ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) and the causes that may explain why some families send their child to ECEC once they reach the age of two while others decide to do so at an earlier age. To answer the first question posed a probit model is used,…

This brief presents select findings from "The Conversion of Enrollment Slots from Head Start to Early Head Start (HS2EHS) Case Studies," six case studies of grant recipients that converted enrollment slots from Head Start to Early Head Start in 2021. This brief focuses on how grant recipients "assess the need for conversion."…

Well-designed physical spaces and appropriate equipment are crucial for enhancing the quality of care and education for infants and toddlers. Four key areas were examined hygiene and safety, learning and development, space and facility management, and sustainability. The study sampled childcare centers based on their geographic distribution and…

Infants are immersed in a world of sounds from the moment their auditory system becomes functional, and experience with the auditory world shapes how their brain processes sounds in their environment. Across cultures, speech and music are two dominant auditory signals in infants' daily lives. Decades of research have repeatedly shown that both…

The theory of natural pedagogy stipulates that infants follow gaze because they are sensitive to the communicative intent of others. According to this theory, gaze following should be present if, and only if, accompanied by at least one of a set of specific ostensive cues. The current article demonstrates gaze following in a range of contexts,…

Previous research has suggested that when a social partner, such as a parent, pays attention to an object, this increases the attention that infants pay to that object during spontaneous, naturalistic play. There are two contrasting reasons why this might be: first, social context may influence increases in infants' endogenous (voluntary)…