For young children, sleep is essential for healthy development. Inadequate sleep can affect emotional, behavioural, cognitive, and health outcomes. Low family income and resources can put children at risk for poor sleep quality, impairing their subsequent cognitive abilities. The current study examined low socioeconomic status (SES) as a factor…

Through observations and interviews and guided by Socio-cultural Theory, this article seeks to describe how dominant approaches to parenting shape child-caregiver interactions within childcare settings. The research question that guided this study is; how do commonly held cultural assumptions about gender, discipline and the purposes of early…

This study adds to the current literature by examining how different developmental areas (language problems or externalizing and internalizing behaviour problems) affect the possibility of a child receiving extra support early in life. The data were drawn from an online survey of 2779 children in Norway conducted in 2015 and included information…

An adapted version of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence--Third Edition (WPPSI-III) was administered to assess cognitive functioning among 1,253 5-year-old children from the Malnutrition and Enteric Disease (MAL-ED) study--an international, multisite study investigating multiple aspects of child development. In this study,…

Early intervention for children with developmental delays or disabilities may prevent future need for special education services. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) allows each state to establish criteria for eligibility for early intervention services for children younger than 3 years old (Part C) and special education…

The absence of violence against children is a fundamental children's right and a major milestone of civilized society. Similarly, reports on incidences of violence "by" children and youth, including severe cases with devastating consequences, speak to the need that the trauma of exposure to violence in childhood needs to be addressed.…

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk…

This study aims to explore the extent of intergenerational social mobility in the United States for the population as a whole, as well as differentiated by gender and race/ethnicity. Study of intergenerational social mobility is important because it shows whether individuals can prosper in a society regardless of their socioeconomic background, as…

Organized semantic representations encoding across- and within-domain distinctions are a hallmark of mature cognition, and understanding how they change with experience and learning is a key endeavor in developmental science. Existing computational modeling studies provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how structured semantic…

In executing purposeful actions, adults select sufficient and necessary limbs. But infants often move goal-irrelevant limbs, suggesting a developmental process of motor specialization. Two experiments with 9- and 12-month-olds revealed gradual decreases in extraneous movements in non-acting limbs during unimanual actions. In Experiment 1,…

Four studies explored the abilities of 80 adults and 180 children (4-9 years), from predominantly middle-class families in the Northeastern United States, to use information about machines' observable functional capacities to infer their internal, "hidden" mechanistic complexity. Children as young as 4 and 5 years old used machines'…

The basic assumption underlying this article is that the really significant changes in human history are those that occur, not in the mechanical gadgets which men use nor in the institutionalized arrangements by which they live, but in their attitudes and in the values which they accept. The revolutions of the past that have had the greatest…

We often assume that students will simply understand specific ethical requirements as they progress, but in reality this does not happen. Students need instruction in ethics. With adherence to the TriCouncil's ethics policy now mandatory for university research with human participants, understanding of ethics is a necessity. We need students to be…

The field of early childhood education (ECE) is currently unable to reach consensus on the extent to which ECE should be based on child development. One manifestation of this situation is the dilemma that early educators purportedly face between teaching the whole child and the curriculum, between developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) and…

Counting is an evolutionarily recent cultural invention of the human species. In order for humans to have conceived of counting in the first place, certain representational and logical abilities must have already been in place. The focus of this article is the origins and nature of those fundamental mechanisms that promoted the emergence of the…