This article describes a thinking process that can lead to meaningful Individualized Education Family Plan outcome statements for young children with disabilities. It offers questions for families and service providers to use to evaluate the outcome statements they craft together and describes some types of outcomes that do make a difference.…

This commentary on "The Effects of Family-Centered Service Coordination: A Social Validity Study" (Romer), discusses the challenges of implementing family-centered service coordination and variables such as caseload size, models of service coordination, and models of staff development that might have an impact on these challenges. (CR)

This article discusses the development of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for American Sign Language (ASL-CDI), a parent report that measures early sign production. Normative data from 69 children (8-36 months) with deafness and their parents with deafness found the development of the ASL-CDI has been successful. (Contains…

This introductory article discusses the large numbers of infants and young children affected by behavioral and emotional problems that pose salient challenges for clinical assessment and management. It examines barriers to the delivery of mental health services and stresses the need to develop data concerning efficacy and effectiveness of…

This article discusses the outcomes of a project that used a community development framework to implement change in early care and intervention services in two culturally diverse communities. It describes how community forums and parent leadership training assisted in change efforts and lessons learned from implementation and evaluating reforms.…

Evaluated versions of the HOME Inventory for use in assessing family child care homes. Found that psychometric properties of child care versions of HOME were similar to those of the original HOME for the family environment. Child care HOME scores were strongly related to observational measures of caregiver behavior and to measures of physical and…

The traditional view of development is stage-like progress toward increasing complexity of form. However, the literature cites many examples in which children do worse before they do better. A major challenge for developmental theory, therefore, is to explain both global progress and apparent regression. In this article, we situate U-shaped…

The author summarizes trends in infant-toddler child care before 1960 and describes how interdisciplinary meetings on early development at the Mental Health Study Center of the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1970s led to the founding of The National Center for Clinical Infant Programs (now ZERO TO THREE) in 1977. Periodic legislative…

Background: The relationship between the age of reaching infant developmental milestones and later intellectual function within the normal population remains unresolved. We hypothesised that the age of learning to stand in infancy would be associated with adult executive function and that the association would be apparent throughout the range of…

Background: Given the importance of parenting for the child's early socio-emotional development, parenting perceptions and behaviours, and their correlates, should be assessed as early as possible in the child's life. The goals of the present study were 1) to confirm, in two parallel population-based samples, including a large sample of twins, the…

Maternal depression is associated with adverse child development, but little is known about the effects of paternal depression. This pilot study estimated the prevalence of paternal depression and mood state, and assessed the relationship between paternal mood and infant temperament. The participants in the study were 98 fathers of newborn babies.…

Children who have both a hearing loss and a visual impairment are a very small but extremely heterogeneous low incidence group. These children vary greatly in the types and degrees of visual impairment and hearing loss. The majority of them have some usable vision and/or hearing, and many have additional disabilities. Most professionals (i.e.,…

One of the most significant societal changes over the past few decades has been the growing number of women in the paid work force. As a direct result of this sociological phenomenon, childcare centres have been providing long day care for vastly increasing numbers of very young children. The speed of this change has created a societal dilemma…

The birth of a preterm infant has been linked with parental distress and adjustment difficulties, yet little is known about the psychosocial factors contributing to this association. Using a cross-sectional design, we therefore examined maternal adjustment following preterm birth, with an emphasis on the potential role of experiential avoidance.…

Background: To examine longitudinal associations between diagnosis, joint attention, play and imitation abilities and language outcome in infants with autism and pervasive developmental disorder. Methods and Procedures: Experimental measures of joint attention, play and imitation were conducted with a sample of infants with autism spectrum…