Disruptive and delinquent girls are not well served by the mental health and juvenile justice systems. Interventions that have been developed for the behavior problems of boys are frequently applied to girls despite growing evidence for a female-specific phenotype, developmental course, and set of risk factors from middle childhood onwards. The…

This chapter considers Robert Kegan's concept of holding environments, as well as six steps necessary for creation of new or adaptation of existing learning environments that facilitate adult development across the life course.

Human service interns completing their four-year Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Tennessee participated in this study which focused on investigating student internship experiences from the perspective of three different internship stage models. the three models studied include those of Infester and Boss (1998), Sweitzer and King…

A longitudinal study examined relations between 2 approaches to identity development: the identity status model and the narrative life story model. Turning point narratives were collected from emerging adults at age 23 years. Identity statuses were collected at several points across adolescence and emerging adulthood, as were measures of…

Babies are active participants in their learning and need to explore a variety of objects. Nurturing relationships support these explorations. Objects are more clearly remembered and understood. Thus, one activity this article suggests doing with a 12-month-old to encourage abstract thinking, is talking about how squeezing the bottle of ketchup…

A relationship between brain responses at birth and later emerging language and reading skills have been shown, but questions remain whether changes in brain responses after birth continue to predict the mastery of language-related skills such as reading development. To determine whether developmental changes in the brain-based perceptual skills…

The association between attachment representations and adolescents' coping with 3 developmental tasks of emerging adulthood-leaving home, advancing in the capacity for mature intimacy, and developing individuation-was examined. Israeli male adolescents (N = 88) were administered the Adult Attachment Interview during their high-school senior year.…

Family functioning is influenced by socio-economic status, culture, family structure, and developmental stage, and is assessed primarily using instruments developed for middle-income European American two-parent families. These instruments may not validly assess low-income African American single-parent families. This qualitative study was…

Home-based counseling is an incredibly demanding intervention, yet little is known about the counselors providing this important service. This study sought to profile ego development, conceptual complexity, and supervision satisfaction for 120 home-based counselors. Counselors scored at moderate levels on measures of both ego development and…

This article takes recent critiques of the conceptualisation of "youth as transition" and explores the extent to which "generation" offers a more effective way of conceptualising youth. There is an identifiable convergence of evidence for a "post-1970" generation who have shaped a "new adulthood". Yet…

This paper is located in a larger study of girls' empowerment within the everyday context of school cultures. While much feminist research has focused on the "perils" of feminine adolescence, we are interested in how girls successfully navigate the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Thus the sample for this paper includes girls who…

Background: This study addresses limitations of previous research by examining the prevalence of body image dissatisfaction within two developmental periods: childhood and adolescence. Methods: A sample of 448 boys and 508 girls completed self-report measures of global body image dissatisfaction. Weight and height of all participants were also…

We present a developmental model that describes normal peer relations and highlights processes that underlie the emergence of problems with peers in childhood. We propose that children's relationships with peers begin in the first years of life, with stable individual differences and preferences for particular peers emerging by three years of age.…

The literature on the importance of early identification and early intervention for children with developmental disabilities such as autism continues to grow. The increased prevalence of autistic spectrum disorders has fostered research efforts on the development and validation of autism-specific screening instruments for use with young children.…

Young children's failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the…