Partnering With Parents, an infant mental health (IMH) intervention program at Starfish Family Services (SFS), is dedicated to improving social-emotional outcomes, supporting wellness, and strengthening relationships between infants and families. Families served by SFS experience a myriad of societal, community, and relational stressors that can…

Through an examination of the reflective comments of 42 pre-service Early Childhood Education Teachers (PS-ECETs), this study describes how an infancy course within an Early Childhood Education program used four different ways of organizing learning to unravel details of infant pedagogy, focusing on the role of the teacher. It is vital to theorize…

This study examined how partnerships between early care and education providers were developed and how they worked together to deliver comprehensive, high-quality services to infants and toddlers from low-income families. Survey data were collected from 220 Early Head Start (EHS) program directors and 386 child care center directors and family…

Research Findings: This study examined the development and implementation of six Early Head Start Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCPs), unique collaborations between EHS grantees and community-based child care partners that expand access to high-quality child care and comprehensive services for low-income infants, toddlers, and their families.…

In a previously published report, our researcher-practitioner partnership demonstrated the effectiveness of a coursework plus higher-dosage coaching professional development intervention (Expanding Quality, EQ) at improving the quality of teacher interactions with children birth-to-3 in center- and home-based child care settings. The current study…

Parent adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and caregiver reports of harsh parenting were examined in relation to the executive function (EF) abilities in young low-income children. Data were collected from 55 "mother-child" dyads; 17-40 months of age. Parent measures included the ACEs questionnaire and harsh parenting items from the…

Several aspects of early language skills, including parent-report measures of vocabulary, phoneme discrimination, speech segmentation, and speed of lexical access predict later childhood language outcomes. To date, no studies have examined the long-term predictive validity of novel word learning. We examined whether individual differences in novel…

How do very young children develop a sense of identity and belonging culturally, and how can this sense be supported by early care and education teachers and programs? This article examines literature associated with identity and belonging in early childhood and how those who work closely with children and families can incorporate best practices…

Several aspects of early language skills, including parent-report measures of vocabulary, phoneme discrimination, speech segmentation, and speed of lexical access predict later childhood language outcomes. To date, no studies have examined the long-term predictive validity of novel word learning. We examined whether individual differences in novel…

This research examined the child, parent, and family conditions under which attachment disorganization was related to both level and change in externalizing behavior during preschool among a community sample. Using the ordinary least squares regression, we found that attachment disorganization at 12 months significantly predicted children's…

The development of attention to dynamic faces versus objects providing synchronous audiovisual versus silent visual stimulation was assessed in a large sample of infants. Maintaining attention to the faces and voices of people speaking is critical for perceptual, cognitive, social, and language development. However, no studies have systematically…

Infants rapidly learn language in their home environments. Between 6 and 12 months of age, infants' ability to process the building blocks of speech (i.e., phonetic information) develops quickly, and this ability predicts later language development. Typically, developing infants in a monolingual language environment rapidly tune in to the phonetic…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of one parent's presence on the quality of the interaction between the other parent and their three-month-old infant. Family interactions were observed in a sample of 69 two-parent families. Parental sensitivity was assessed during two sessions, first in a "dyadic" context (D) and then…

Studies showed that individual differences in encoding speed as well as looking behaviour during the encoding of facial stimuli can relate to differences in subsequent face discrimination. Nevertheless, a direct linkage between encoding speed and looking behaviour during the encoding of facial stimuli and the role of these encoding characteristics…

Caregiver speech is not a static collection of utterances, but occurs in "conversational exchanges," in which caregiver and child dynamically influence each other's speech. We investigate (a) whether children and caregivers modulate the prosody of their speech as a function of their interlocutor's speech, and (b) the influence of the…