The prevalence of traumatic stress in the lives of families who are homeless is extraordinarily high. Often these families are headed by single mothers who have experienced ongoing trauma in the form of childhood abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and community violence, as well as the trauma associated with poverty and the loss of home,…

Background: Postpartum period is associated with higher rates for depression, blues and psychosis. Anxiety is also significant. These disorders may have serious implications in the cognitive development of the infant. There is relative lack of data in this area. So we tried to estimate postpartum anxiety and depression in a group of women and…

Initial validation data are presented for the Risky Situation (RS), a 20-minute observational procedure designed to assess the father-child activation relationship with children aged 12-18 months. The coding grid, which is simple and easy to use, allows parent-child dyads to be classified into three categories and provides an activation score. By…

Aim: The aim of this study was to determine whether psychosocial stimulation up to the age of 2 years benefits cognition and behaviour at age 6 years in low-birthweight, term-born (LBW-T) children (gestational age greater than or equal to 37wk, birthweight less than 2500g), and to compare LBW-T and normal-birthweight (NBW) children. Method: LBW-T…

The objective of this study was to evaluate how parent-infant music classes would benefit young mothers frequenting a support group for young mothers at a community centre in comparison to a group of older mothers. When the courses had terminated the mothers were interviewed in their homes and their singing confidence was assessed, as well as…

In this essay, Robert Davis argues that much of the moral anxiety currently surrounding children in Europe and North America emerges at ages and stages curiously familiar from traditional Western constructions of childhood. The symbolism of infancy has proven enduringly effective over the last two centuries in associating the earliest years of…

We study the impact of maternal care on early child development using an expansion in Canadian maternity leave entitlements. Following the leave expansion, mothers who took leave spent 48-58 percent more time not working in their children's first year of life. This extra maternal care primarily crowded out home-based care by unlicensed…

For infants and toddlers demonstrating feeding problems, it is critical to find the basis for the problems to create more pleasurable mealtimes for the child, his or her family members, and caregivers. Feeding difficulties can affect general health, developmental gains, and emotional well-being. Understanding the cause of feeding problems and…

This study explored the effects of basic developmental care on the behaviour of very pre-term infants and parental stress at 1 and 2 years of corrected age. A randomized controlled trial was done to compare basic Developmental Care (standardized nests and incubator covers) and controls (standard care). Parents of infants born less than 32 weeks of…

Based on doctoral dissertation, Brown University (1966), and supported by grants GB-4151 and GB-724 from the National Science Foundation.

The purpose of this research was to assess the infant's abilities to make successive discriminations in the size of a figure. The subjects were 90 10-month-old infants. (Author/MP)

Results obtained from 27 infants ranging in age from 10 to 12 weeks indicated that infants develop expectancies regarding how stimuli occurring in particular contexts should behave based on their prior experiences with these stimuli. (Author/RH)

Two experiments investigated the ability of 3-month-olds to acquire generalized expectancies of reward and the role of these expectancies in memory retrieval. In both experiments, infants exhibited positive transfer over invariant and variable stimulus series; however, in the second experiment, violations of either expected order produced a…

Two experiments examined changes in the search of infants aged six, seven, and eight months. Experiment 1 found that the majority of infants displayed transitional search before intentional search. Experiment 2 showed that the infants' awareness of a hidden object develops gradually. (Author/RH)

Investigates infant behavior with respect to the development of object permanance. Nine-month-old infants were presented with a problem in which they saw an object hidden in one of two places but were prevented from searching for it until after the spatial relationship between infant and object was changed in some way. (Author/SS)