It is essential for physical education teachers to utilize a foundation of physiological principles to design and monitor appropriate, safe, and effective exercise for their students. Adult training programs are not appropriate for children. Teachers should consider individual levels of maturation, motor skill ability, and affective needs when…

When a baby screams, that is a signal that all is not well for the body of the baby, for her emotional well-being, and/or for the baby's relationship with the teacher. During the first year of life, infants learn that adults are in control of providing reassuring care. Adults will "make things better" when a baby's tummy feels horribly empty, when…

Parents generally want the best for their children. They want their young children to feel supported while being challenged and encouraged and led toward independence. Parenting that is most supportive of a child's development and adjustment to the outside world is characterized by consistent enforcement of standards for behavior, concern for…

Infants' sensitivity to social contingencies was assessed. In Study 1, 1-month-old infants and their mothers interacted face-to-face in three types of imperfect contingent interactions: Normal, Non-Contingent and Imitation. One-month-old infants did not discriminate these conditions. In Study 2, 3-month-old infants were tested as in Study 1. At 3…

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n= 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves,…

This study investigates children's ability to use language to guide their choice of individuation criterion in the domains of objects and events. Previous work (Shipley, E. F., & Shepperson, B. (1990). Countable entities: developmental changes. "Cognition," 34, 109-136.) has shown that children have a strong bias to use a spatio-temporal…

Few pedestrian injury prevention programs appear to articulate the theory upon which their design and evaluation are based. This article describes how theory was used to plan, develop, implement, and evaluate the educational component of a comprehensive child pedestrian intervention. Organizational and planning theories were used to guide the…

While very young children's understanding of objects as symbols for other entities has been the focus of much investigation, very little is known concerning the emergence of comprehension for symbolic relations among actions modeled with toy replicas and their real counterparts. We used videotaped depictions of real actions in a preferential…

Seventy-two 2-year-olds participated in a study designed to test two competing accounts of the effect of contextual change on children's ability to learn a word for an object. The mechanistic account hypothesizes that any change in context that highlights a target object will lead to word learning; the social-pragmatic account maintains that a…

Twenty-five newborn infants were tested for auditory-oral matching behavior when presented with the consonant sound /m/ and the vowel sound /a/--a precursor behavior to vocal imitation. Auditory-oral matching behavior by the infant was operationally defined as showing the mouth movement appropriate for producing the model sound just heard (mouth…

The author looks at the sharp increase in a number of childhood disorders--including asthma, certain cancers, and learning/behavioral disabilities--and the role environmental toxins may play in this increase. He describes the need to train many more health professionals in prenatal and children's environmental health and the national network of…

The article by Fantuzzo, McWayne, and Bulotsky (2003) describes a model for addressing the former U.S. Surgeon General's (USDHHS, 1999) priorities for improving mental health service delivery to the nation's children. The authors identify several elements that characterize their own work and that can guide the work of school psychologists and…

Dance Education can be considered an aspect of everyday living when using the correct definition of dance education. Rather than referring to the rarified form of movement that we encounter on the concert stage, dance education is the education of our moving selves with the goal as self expression. This can be initiated as an aspect of the initial…

This paper examines some of the research on imitation that shows it to be much more than simply a behavioural or reflex response, but rather an aspect of the growth of genuine social and psychological interaction and part of an intersubjective process that includes the representation of object relationships. Differentiations between mind,…

Children's developing competence with symbolic representations was assessed in 3 studies. Study 1 examined the hypothesis that the production of imaginary symbolic objects in pantomime requires the simultaneous coordination of the dual representations of a dynamic action and a symbolic object. We explored this coordination of symbolic…