Community health workers possess valuable insight into the experiences of South Africa's children and caregivers. However, their knowledge is often overlooked in efforts to understand local realities, inform interventions, and develop relevant policies. This study aimed to explore community health workers' perspectives of the first 1000 days of…

An expansive view of care is vital to understanding children's sense-making of their care experiences in early childhood education. Yet, scant literature explores how toddlers enact and express understandings of care in their play with objects and others. This article identifies play situations where toddlers enact and express understandings, and…

Fifty-one 23-to-55-month-old-infants faced two apparatuses that required the use of a rigid (box apparatus) or flexible (hose apparatus) stick-like tool to retrieve a toy stuck inside. Before attempting the extraction, however, they had to pick the only one tool (of three) on display that had the appropriate rigidity/flexibility to be effective.…

Globally, an estimated 15 million children are born prematurely each year, resulting in a high burden of under-five mortality and neurodevelopmental disability. Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is a key intervention to support the development of preterm infants. However, evidence on the impact of KMC in routine care settings remains limited. This paper…

Family routines provide young children with predictable, repeatable, and functional contexts for learning about the world. Participating in family routines is a critical pathway by which all children learn. While the use of family routines in caregiver-implemented interventions (CIIs) is supported by theories, research, and recommended practices,…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

This article describes literacy competence in the narratives of toddlers and investigates how they make use of different modalities, like gestures, sounds and physical actions. The body phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty serves as a theoretical frame for the researcher's lens, which is an A/r/tographer's lens applied in multimodal narrative analysis.…

Research concerning temperament in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has suggested a consistent profile of low positive affect, high negative affect, and low regulation (Visser et al., 2016). One area receiving less attention is individual differences among children diagnosed with ASD. The primary objective of this study was…

Maternal input addressed to children after an early hospitalization (EH) was longitudinally compared to maternal input directed to typically developing children (TD), at 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months of age. The data were analyzed with the CHILDES tools for (a) word-tokens (b) word-types (c) Mean Length of Utterances (MLU) and (d) questions in which…

Children under five are expelled at high rates from early learning settings, yet little research discusses the relationship between program quality and expulsion. This study examined the relationship between program quality (accreditation, quality rating system participation, child:teacher ratios, suggesting programs are not a match, administrator…

Assessment of emerging literacy in young children is generally limited to either skill development in children over 3 years of age or the quality and context of young children's early literacy experiences. Although there has been promotion of their early literacy experiences, assessment of emerging pre-literacy behaviors in children younger than 3…

The Recipe 4 Success preventive intervention targeted multiple factors critical to the health and well-being of toddlers living in poverty. This randomized controlled trial, which was embedded within Early Head Start home visits for 12 weeks, included 242 racially and ethnically diverse families (51% girls; toddler mean age = 2.58 years; data…

There is scant empirical work on associations between current and past cannabis use in parents of young children. As recreational cannabis use is now legal in nearly half of states in the U.S., cannabis use is becoming more ubiquitous. In the current study, parents of toddler and pre-school age children were randomly assigned to participate in an…

This study investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are sensitive to mispronunciations of familiar words and compared their sensitivity to children with typical-development. Sixty-four toddlers with ASD and 31 younger, typical controls participated in a looking-while-listening task that measured their accuracy in fixating…

Purpose: This study examined toddlers' processing of mispronunciations based on their frequency of occurrence in child speech and the speaker who produced them. Method: One hundred twenty 22-month-olds were assigned to 1 of 4 conditions. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, toddlers were shown visual displays containing 1 familiar…