The Babysong Project arose out of the Baby Room Project and its aims included supporting baby room practitioners to develop 'communicative musicality' (Malloch & Trevarthen 2009), extending research knowledge about baby room practices and helping practitioners to explore opportunities to question and adapt their own ways of working with babies…

Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between…

Purpose: Oncological diseases, especially if experienced in the first 3 years of life, expose young children to conditions of serious physical and emotional stress causing delays in their physical development, cognitive acquisitioning and issues related to their emotional and social functioning. This study examines the effects of the participation…

In the US, recent efforts have focused on professionalizing the field of early childhood. One way to indicate professionalism is through the terms used to describe both the field and the workers. However, few have examined how practitioners or researchers describe early childhood professionals' work. Using multiple data sources and analytic…

Research Findings: This study examined the extent to which children's development and growth in oral language and literacy skills during the early childhood period predicted writing ability in the primary grades. Participants were 313 children who were tested on a battery of oral language and literacy measures at four time points, beginning during…

Research Findings: A growing number of stakeholders in early childhood education (ECE) rely on self-assessment to assess and improve the quality of ECE. In this systematic review, we investigated the reliability and validity of self-assessment in ECE, summarizing findings from 27 publications. We meta-analytically synthesized findings from 25…

Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

Reading and literacy skills are essential to fostering a child's development and academic success. Research has consistently highlighted the importance of early literacy proficiency as a strong indicator of later academic achievement, cognitive ability, and social-emotional well-being (Espinosa, 2002; Gottlieb et al., 2022). Unfortunately, reading…

Risky play provides various benefits to child growth and development. The culture of overprotection among Hong Kong parents have decreased young children's opportunities to engage in play that involves physically challenges. This study expanded our understanding of parents' views and behaviors on allowing their preschool children opportunities for…

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

This user-friendly guide uses narrative storytelling to describes the principles of early relational health with direct application to day-to-day work with infants and parents. Practitioners on the front lines often feel great pressure to know "what to do" in a wide range of challenging situations. Drawing on both developmental science…

The current study aims to identify changing trends in digital play addiction tendencies among young children and parental guidance strategies before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the bioecological model of development, it was hypothesized that the pandemic would have a significant impact on the addiction to digital play…

Preschoolers have different experiences in different environments. These experiences can stimulate children's imaginations. This longitudinal study examines the impact of preschool children's three-year experiences in early childhood institutions, which are their primary educational environments. The question 'Do preschoolers imagine different…

The study explored parents' opinions regarding the forest kindergarten attended by their children. Six parents participated in the study. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore their experiences. The topics raised in the interviews concerned four areas: sources of parents' knowledge about forest kindergartens; arguments for choosing a…