The nine brief articles composing this report focus on several aspects of overpopulation and related problems. The first article discusses needs of third-world children in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The second discusses the importance of "childspacing," major health risks of excessive births, breastfeeding for birth…

Practical information is supplied that can be directly applied to early childhood projects and used for staff inservice in data collection procedures. This information assists in documenting the overall effectiveness of an approach and aids in making the frequent educational decisions to ensure the child is benefiting from instruction. Separate…

Social and cognitive theories indicate that conflict plays an important role in an individual's psychological development. Research findings bearing on this conundrum provide initial hints about what social conflict in children is like and how it relates to characteristics of the child, but the short and long term positive and negative effects of…

The paper details the impact of blindness and visual impairments on young children's development. Specific developmental risks are examined for the following areas (sample difficulties in parentheses): body awareness (delayed concept of object permanence), motor development (lack of incentive to explore and resultant delay in purposeful movement),…

To relate the way in which children structure stories at different age levels to their performance on other tasks or to their general stage of cognitive development, a study required subjects of four age groups to participate in working memory tasks in two different paradigms and to generate stories involving a variety of characters. The structure…

Some of the ways young children initially approach writing, including their understanding and involvement with the writing process, is the focus of this paper. It illustrates the variety of ways children deal with the concept of spaces between words, the differences between printed and cursive writing, and the left-to-right, top-to-bottom…

The focus of this study was to explore the relationship between culture and children's development, and to suggest that inquiry into narratives is a way of understanding how children live and develop in a cultural sense. The article begins by inquiring into the nature of culture in the Hong Kong context and explaining the ways in which it might…

This article examines the implications of a "problem of the present". It explores the potential conflicts and fragmentation that may arise as a result of divisions in the interpretation of the metanarrative of child development within the two disciplines of education and human services. Childcare in Australia is strongly driven by this…

Discusses the need for child advocacy in education and other social services for children. Points to school psychology as providing an ideal opportunity for many child advocacy concepts to be implemented. Describes how child advocacy can be built into the school psychology training program. (Author/PC)

This collection of papers reviews the effects of sport and physical activity on children. It is organized around six sections representing the basic disciplines that contribute to a broad view of the child in sport and physical activity: physiology; medicine; growth and development; psychology; sociology; and motor learning. Although each paper…

Past research on the development of referential communication abilities in children does not provide a basis for explaining precisely why communicative effectiveness increases. The common assumption is that developments in role-taking facilitate the child's ability to adapt to hearers. A reasonable alternative explanation is that a child's…

The purpose of this research was to investigate egocentrism and to investigate the relationships between egocentrism, popularity, and certain playground behaviors for students in Grades 1-5. More than 200 students participated in the study. The results showed that: (1) egocentrism decreases with age, (2) males were less egocentric than females at…

The family is the basic physical and emotional support system in American society. Dysfunction of a family member may reflect family dysfunction and certainly affects the well-being of other family members. Disturbances in the mother can have profound effects on family functioning and child development, as mothers bear most of the responsibility…

Presents most effective teaching techniques used by Elk Grove High School, California, in interdisciplinary courses on family-life education and child development. (ND)