"Parents and the High Cost of Child Care: 2012 Report" presents 2011 data reflecting what parents pay for full-time child care in America. It includes average fees for both child care centers and family child care homes. Information was collected through a survey conducted in January 2012 that asked for the average costs charged for…

Approximately 228,000 children from birth to age 3 are affected by a disability. Developmental challenges may include severe, chronic disabilities that can begin at birth and last a lifetime. Delayed speech and language are the most common types of developmental delays among infants and toddlers. Many of these children are at risk for later…

"Inclusion" has long been a term used to describe the practice of including a child with special needs in age-appropriate general education classes in their home schools. Increasingly, the term is being used to describe the process of including very young children--infants and toddlers--with special needs in a setting comprised mostly of children…

The LPR and STin2 polymorphisms of the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) were combined into haplotypes that, together with quality of maternal parenting, were used to predict initial levels and linear change in children's (N = 138) noncompliance and aggression from age 18-54 months. Quality of mothers' parenting behavior was observed when…

Objectives: To obtain comprehensive, reliable data on the direct cost of pediatric abusive head trauma in New Zealand, and to use this data to evaluate the possible cost-benefit of a national primary prevention program. Methods: A 5 year cohort of infants with abusive head trauma admitted to hospital in Auckland, New Zealand was reviewed. We…

Objectives: Infant crying is particularly frustrating to caregivers in the first few months of life and the most common trigger for shaking and abuse. The effectiveness of the "Period of PURPLE Crying" prevention materials (DVD and booklet) designed to increase knowledge and change behaviors related to crying and the dangers of shaking…

We investigated the influence of biological immaturity and attachment security on linguistic development and tested whether maternal language mediated the impact of security on the child's linguistic abilities. Forty mother-child dyads were followed longitudinally, with the child's attachment security assessed at 24 months of age through trained…

The fields of special education/early intervention and infant mental health are moving closer, as practitioners find common ground in understanding and intervening to support vulnerable infants and toddlers. The importance of the impact of relationships on all developmental domains has been brought to the foreground. This includes relationships…

Objective: Research suggests that early life adversity may affect subsequent parenting. Animal studies investigating mechanisms of transmission have focused on biological factors; whereas research in humans has emphasized cognitive and psychosocial factors. We hypothesized that neuropsychological and physiological factors would act as mediators…

Aberrant attention is a core feature of fragile X syndrome (FXS), however, little is known regarding the developmental trajectory and underlying physiological processes of attention deficits in FXS. Atypical visual attention is an early emerging and robust indicator of autism in idiopathic (non-FXS) autism. Using a biobehavioral approach with gaze…

Vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias. The perception of the /i/-/e/ contrast was explored in 144…

Aim: The collection of data on longer-term neurodevelopmental outcomes within large neonatal randomized controlled trials by trained assessors can greatly increase costs and present many operational difficulties. The aim of this study was to develop a more practical alternative for identifying major cognitive delay in infants at the age of 24…

Investigating the neuronal network underlying language processing may contribute to a better understanding of how the brain masters this complex cognitive function with surprising ease and how language is acquired at a fast pace in infancy. Modern neuroimaging methods permit to visualize the evolvement and the function of the language network. The…

The study investigates acquisition of verb inflections by four monolingual Hebrew-acquiring children from middle-class backgrounds, audio-recorded in longitudinal, weekly samples at a mean age-range of between 18 and 26 months. Productive use of inflectional morphology is shown to manifest increasing structural specification, as a function of…

Communication spontaneously initiated by infants at heightened risk (HR; n = 15) for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is compared with that in low-risk (LR; n = 15) infants at 13 and 18 months of age. Infants were observed longitudinally during naturalistic in-home interaction and semistructured play with caregivers. At both ages, HR infants…