For 25 years, the Gardner Center has worked in close partnership with school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area to develop research-informed policies, programs, and practices that support positive and equitable youth development. Several of these partnerships involve districts that are not part of a unified school district, meaning that…

Social mobility scholars have long been interested in estimating the effect of intergenerational mobility, typically measured by differences in the socioeconomic status between parents and offspring, on later-life outcomes of offspring. In a 2022 article "Heterogeneous Effects of Intergenerational Social Mobility: An Improved Method and New…

There is a growing demand for new leaders. Academic interest in leadership development has surged in recent years. Most studies focus on leadership development in general, neglecting leadership development among children and/or leadership development among children growing up in specific contexts, such as domestic violence households. Existing…

The home literacy environment (HLE) plays an important role in children's early literacy learning. Texting programs are an increasing feature of family literacy interventions that support parent engagement in their children's learning. Unlike face-to-face interventions, texting programs can offer sustained parental support at low cost and large…

Using both online and offline measures, this study investigates how maternal education and work status (stay-at-home, part-time, full-time) are jointly associated with infants' word learning ability and vocabulary size. One hundred 24-month-old infants completed a lab-based mutual exclusivity task, which assesses infants' novel word learning…

The process by which infants learn verbs through daily social interactions is not well-understood. This study investigated caregivers' use of verbs, which have highly abstract meanings, during unscripted toy-play. We examined how verbs co-occurred with distributional and embodied factors including pronouns, caregivers' manual actions, and infants'…

This article reports the findings of a multi-site qualitative study of 31 Chinese homeschooling families in Taipei and Hong Kong. Homeschooling, a significant source of inspiration for school innovation, has been growing around the globe in recent years, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighting the challenges facing…

Student-student relationships, as forms of peer interaction, are central components in school life and exert positive effects on children. Based on social cognitive theory, the current study examined the mediating effect of perceived discrimination on the association between student-student relationships and bullying victimization and the…

This study explores how parents in Lebanon select schools and how their choices contribute to educational inequality, especially during the ongoing severe economic, political and refugee crises. Using an exploratory methodology within a qualitative research design, the study included 30 semi-structured interviews with parents of school-aged…

Participants (N = 226; M[subscript age] = 27.2) completed questionnaires about their care history, attitudes toward non-parental care and maternal employment, their preference for working from home, and demographic characteristics. Overall, attitudes toward non-parental care and maternal employment skewed in a positive direction. More time spent…

The home numeracy environment is suggested to influence children's numerical development, but causal evidence for this assertion remains limited. Addressing this gap, we randomly assigned 117 predominantly White 4-5-year-olds (M = 4.68 years, SD = 0.2, 47% girls) attending preschool in Flanders (Belgium) to either an experimental (numeracy) or an…

Parents play an important role in shaping the faith of their children. Prior research demonstrates that the quality of parent-child relationships and the incorporation of spiritual disciplines into the home matter to faith formation. However, the association between spiritual disciplines and the quality of parent-child relationships has not…

Parental separation during childhood leads to long-lasting psychological and socioemotional impact on the lives of emerging adults as they transition into higher education. The long-term effects of childhood parental separation on college students' academic performance, physical health, and overall mental wellbeing are well-documented. However,…

This paper explores the school choice decisions of middle-class parents in Lucknow City, India. The study highlights the indices that appeal to middle-class sensibilities in their pursuit of choosing the best schooling option for their children. The study unearths the influence of informal social networks on school choice decisions. Additionally,…

Parents of autistic children have historically reported hardships related to raising their children. However, the access to resources related to the childrearing of an autistic child is not equitable, therefore resulting in exacerbated difficulties for parents in low-resource settings. In these situations, peer support may be a protective factor…