Purpose: As part of a larger grant-funded project, a professional development (PD) series was conducted within the framework of a school-university partnership to improve teachers' capacity to meaningfully include fathers and father figures in the school environment, with a particular focus on fathers of children with disabilities. The authors…

Violent crimes and domestic violence are notoriously high in South Africa, which leaves many children defenceless to struggle with emotions such as loneliness and sadness. The healthy development and socialisation of children can be difficult in a society characterised by domestic tribulations, poverty, crime, single-parent homes, and absent…

This article presents the novel Child Attachment Relationship (CAR) Guide for social workers in child protection and fostering. The Guide was created to promote social workers' understandings of children's attachment relationship and to identify the means through which those understandings might be enhanced towards their practice. The research and…

Indigenous frameworks suggest environmental risk and protective factors for American Indian (AI) children's development can be understood in terms of connecting and disconnecting forces in five domains: spirituality, family, intergenerational ties, community, and environment/land. This study examined the prevalence of these forces among 156 urban…

Given the hegemony of developmentalism in early childhood education and care, this article uses a poetic juxtapositional approach to bewilder Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Critical consideration of how the theory of cognitive development has contributed to the imagining of a universal, ahistorical child and childhood(s) are discussed…

This longitudinal multiple case study explores children's transitions within early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland. In ECEC children typically transition from one group or center to another. This study explores how physical, social and philosophical discontinuities and continuities constitute these transitions. Five focus children's…

This article recounts the changes that occurred when a research study was redesigned to become more participatory, involving children, teachers, families, and the wider symbolic cultural neighbourhood. What emerged was a research study that was "integrated" into the curriculum of a four-year-old classroom. Here, the process is…

This meta-analysis examined the associations between teachers' language practices and children's language development from preschool to third grade. We screened 14,852 articles. A total of 119 articles from 104 distinct studies were analyzed, comprising 415 effect sizes across 13,572 teachers and 112,533 child participants. The result of the…

Children tend to select a novel object rather than a familiar object when asked to identify the referent of a novel label. Current accounts of this so-called "disambiguation effect" do not address whether children have a general metacognitive representation of this way of determining the reference of novel labels. In two experiments…

Emotions remain something of a mystery for most of us even when we accept their centrality to development in general and to infancy in particular. I make 2 arguments in this paper. One: that the most crucial thing about emotions is that they allow mutuality of engagement with other emotional beings--not only evoking responses, but also provoking…

Epidemiological evidence links exposure to early life adversities--such as childhood maltreatment--with impaired health and well-being in adulthood. Since these effects are usually unrecognized or untreated in childhood, preventive and remediating interventions in adults are needed. Our focus on adulthood prompted three major questions. First,…

In two experiments, one hundred and sixty-two 6- to 8-year-olds were asked to reason counterfactually about events with different causal structures. All events involved overdetermined outcomes in which two different causal events led to the same outcome. In Experiment 1, children heard stories with either an ambiguous causal relation between…

Although children's physical environments play an important role in their development, there have been few empirical studies on the interior design of early childhood centres. This is partly due to a lack of adequate methods and instruments for the systematic spatial investigation of educational environments. In light of this, the following paper…

Children learn about the world through others' testimony, and much of this knowledge likely comes from parents. Furthermore, parents may sometimes want children to share their beliefs about topics on which there is no universal consensus. In discussing such topics, parents may use explicit belief statements (e.g., "Evolution is real") or…

Background: While delays in cognitive development are detectable during early development in Down syndrome, the neuropsychological and biomedical underpinnings of cognitive skill acquisition in this population remain poorly understood. Method: To explore this issue, 38 infants with Down syndrome [mean chronological age = 9.65 months; SD = 3.64]…