Too often in California, children (especially children of color, foster youth, and those growing up in poverty) lack the components critical for a healthy early life. For example, as few as 3% of families that might benefit from voluntary home visiting have access to home visiting programs, 32% of children entering foster care are under the age of…

There is considerable dispute about the nature of infant memory. Using SEM models, we examined whether popular characterizations of the structure of adult memory, including the two-process theory of recognition, are applicable in the infant and toddler years. The participants were a cohort of preterms and full-terms assessed longitudinally--at 1,…

This paper presents the psychometric properties of the Polish version of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire&-Revised (IBQ-R). A group of 396 pairs of parents was studied, and a 3-factor structure of IBQ-R emerged with differences comparing to the original U.S. sample and a prior replication Russian sample. Analyses demonstrated satisfactory…

Maternal responsive-didactic caregiving (RDC) and infant advanced object play were investigated in a sample of 400 mothers and their 10-month-old infants during video-recorded semi-structured play interactions. Three maternal behaviours: contingent response, cognitively stimulating language and autonomy-promoting speech were coded and infant…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

Recent work has shown that children have detailed phonological representations of consonants at both word-initial and word-final edges. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether onsets and codas are equally represented by young learners since word edges are isomorphic with syllable edges in this work. The current study sought to explore toddler's…

Infant-toddler teachers have the least education, the lowest pay, and the highest turnover rate of all adults in the field of early childhood education. In this article, the unique needs of infants, toddlers, and their families are explored at the 2-year associate (AA) and the 4-year bachelor (BA) levels of early childhood higher education degree…

This article weaves the stories of three practitioner-family relationships and describes how the Parent-Child Relationship Competencies (PCRCs; St. John, 2010) function as a map for assessment and treatment planning. The PCRCs are a set of culturally variable yet universal bi-directional (parent-to-child and child-to-parent) relational capacities…

Infants and toddlers who live in poverty are more likely to experience developmental delays or disabilities and less likely to access early intervention (EI) services. The federal initiative Race to the Top--Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) was designed to increase access to high quality early learning programs for children at risk for…

Positive emotional engagement develops in the context of face-to-face interactions during the first 6 months of life. Deficits in emotional engagement are characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and may characterize the younger siblings of children with ASD (high-risk siblings). High-risk siblings are likely to exhibit a broad range of…

While factors influencing maternal emotional availability (EA) have been well investigated, little is known about the development of child EA. The present longitudinal study investigated the role of frontal brain asymmetry in young children with regard to child EA (child responsiveness and involvement) in mother-child interaction in a sample of 28…

Although virtually all Inuit children in eastern Arctic Canada learn Inuktitut as their native language, there is a critical lack of tools to assess their level of language ability. This article investigates how mean length of utterance (MLU), a widely-used assessment measure in English and other languages, can be best applied in Inuktitut. The…

This article introduces and recommends mindfulness as a significant resource for earliest childhood practice, especially for parents and providers. Mindfulness is defined as it is coming to be understood and used by increasing numbers of people and systems in North America. The article also addresses how mindfulness is sometimes expressed and…

Circumcision is a surgical excision of the foreskin to the level of the coronal sulcus which may perform in the neonatal period or in later life. Circumcision has many medical benefits such as minimizing urinary tract infection, reduces the incidence of balanitis and enhances of penile hygiene, prevents of penile cancer. However, Circumcision may…

Impairments in language and communication are an early-appearing feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), with delays in language and gesture evident as early as the first year of life. Research with typically developing populations highlights the importance of both infant and maternal gesture use in infants' early language development.…