Early intervention for children with behavioural difficulties can be effective in terms of outcomes for both the children and their families. Early intervention can save a child from long-term outcomes such as school failure, peer rejection and later offending. However, in terms of accurate assessment of young children's behavioural difficulties,…

Prenatal and perinatal risk factors, such as low birth weight, have been linked to higher levels of aggressive and destructive behaviours during childhood. Although low birth weight is associated with childhood externalizing behaviour, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain open to empirical investigation. The current study extends the…

Children who engage in chronic problem behavior can present challenges for their early childhood teachers and are more likely to develop negative relationships with these and other adults with whom they interact. Unfortunately, children who develop negative relationships with their teachers early in their school careers are more likely to have…

Georgia has one of the few state-funded universal pre-kindergarten programs in the United States, with the aim of providing pre-k services to all 4-year-olds whose families want their children to participate in the program, regardless of family income level. In the 2011-2012 school year, Georgia's Pre-K Program served a total of over 94,000…

Although research has examined how parenting may influence children's social information processing, little research has examined how these factors may influence children's social goals. The current study examined how both parent- and child-reports of parenting behaviors were associated with regressed change in children's reported social goals…

Autism is primarily a social disorder and deficits in social-orienting may be responsible for the failure of children with autism to initiate critical social behaviors. The purpose of this research was to improve the quality of social interactions of children with autism by implementing naturalistic behavior strategies intervention utilizing a…

Child behavior problems are a concern for parents and teachers alike and are associated with later academic and behavioral difficulties. Parents' participation in their children's schooling has been shown to help reduce problem behaviors over time. Research indicates that parents are more likely to participate in their children's schooling when…

When parents get together, the subject of appropriately addressing the behavior of their children often comes to the forefront of conversations. Parents share various challenges they face with their children, including issues associated with listening, eating vegetables, doing chores, and a host of other discipline-related situations. The plethora…

The authors tested a series of models linking spanking and child social-emotional outcomes using a sample of 3,870 families from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. Spanking was measured by the number of times the focal child was spanked by the mother at ages 1, 3, and 5. Internalizing and externalizing symptoms were assessed using the…

Benchmarking is a program evaluation approach that can be used to study whether the outcomes of parents/children who participate in an evidence-based program in the community approximate the outcomes found in randomized trials. This paper presents a case illustration using benchmarking methodology to examine a community implementation of…

Objective: How does the behavioral expression of autism in fragile X syndrome (FXS + Aut) compare with idiopathic autism (iAut)? Although social impairments and restricted, repetitive behaviors are common to these variants of autism, closer examination of these symptom domains may reveal meaningful similarities and differences. To this end, the…

Negative perceptions about the child and child behavior are implicit in parenting stress, a construct associated with suboptimal parenting and child outcomes. We examined the extent to which individual differences in mothers' mental representations of their children (mind-mindedness) were related to parenting stress and observed parenting…

Developing meaningful ways of listening to children's views has been reinforced through legislation and this has led to new approaches, such as "spiritual listening", being developed. "Spiritual listening" aims to listen to children's views on philosophical concepts such as "drive," "destiny,"…

Later-born siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are at increased risk for ASD as well as qualitatively similar traits not meeting clinical cutoffs for the disorder. This study examined age five neurocognitive and behavioral outcomes of 39 younger siblings of children with ASD (Sibs-ASD) and 22 younger siblings of typically…

This study compared mothers and fathers' regulation with respect to 29 children with intellectual disability (ID) and 30 typically developing (TD) children, matched on their mental age (MA), as they solved eight tasks using physical materials and computers. Seven parents' regulatory strategies were coded as they supported their child's…