Discusses the urgent need to develop leadership in early childhood education in order to improve the quality of programming for infants, toddlers, young children, and their families. Describes five areas of leadership skills: advocacy, administrative, community, conceptual, and career development. (KB)

The infant-and-toddler child-care program at the Child and Family Research Center at University of Nevada, Reno, is based on children's need for consistent, stable, and reliable adult care. Children stay with the same primary caregiver for the first three years. Four broad themes of the program are: attachment and trust, teacher-parent relations,…

Onset of canonical babbling was investigated for 1,536 high-risk infants at about 10-months corrected age. Although delays were infrequent, they were often associated with genetic, neurological, anatomical, and/or physiological abnormalities. Over half the cases of late canonical babbling, at the time of discovery, were not associated with prior…

An evaluation of 3,469 infants at risk found that of those who showed late onset of canonical babbling, fewer than half had been diagnosed with a medical problem accounting for the delay. A follow-up study found those with delayed canonical babbling had smaller vocabularies at 18, 24, and 30 months. (Author/CR)

Examines three alternatives to the classical framework of early cognitive development: modularity-nativism, connectionism, and theory-theory. Arguments are marshaled to support the "theory-theory" view, which emphasizes a combination of innate structure and qualitative reorganization in children's thought based on input from the people and things…

Six children were studied from the age of 6 months to 1 year and 6 months to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational…

Describes a unique, employer-based infant care program that allows parents to care for their babies in the workplace, and reports on the response of coworkers to this arrangement. Results indicate that parenting babies in the workplace has little, if any, perceived negative effect on the work life of other employees. (Author/GCP)

Gives a detailed account of the lexical growth in a bilingual child (German and English) and discusses its theoretical implications. Evaluating the principle of contrast in bilingual acquisition, concludes that evidence of lexical-equivalent learning and usage of equivalents can contribute to the debate on language separation in bilingual infants.…

Explores the role of culture in assessment and the challenges of cultural dynamics and family issues relative to six areas of assessment: the target of assessment, the setting, the methods, the personnel, the uses, and the fusion of assessment with intervention. (CR)

Examined parents' participation in early caregiving tasks and social support for involvement with infants in two-parent Navajo Indian families. Found that fathers invested about 60% as much time as mothers in direct caregiving. Parents did not differ on reports of social supports for childcare. Parents received more extrafamilial and/or…

Assessed the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-year-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. A cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants was conducted, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.…

This longitudinal study of social services and juvenile court files identified factors associated with court outcomes for drug exposed infants (N=118). Regression analysis suggested that mothers' compliance with court orders was the major predictor of court outcomes although chi square analysis found ethnicity, past referrals, and criminal record…

This article discusses why the universal adoption of family-centered values and practice in early intervention is problematic in the context of the current state of early intervention. Recommendations are provided for the new millennium, including participatory research in family-centered early intervention and personnel preparation based on…

Explored the perceptions of 13 Taiwanese mothers of 12-month-olds regarding the benefits of parent-infant interaction for development of social competence and parents' role in achieving these benefits. Found that mothers thought parent-infant interactive play contributed to both emotional and social components of social competence. Themes within…

Examined intergroup and intragroup variations in Anglo and Puerto Rican mothers' beliefs regarding long-term socialization goals and in their organization of feeding, social play, teaching, and free play interactions. Found evidence of heterogeneity in cultural groups. In sub-communities defined by social class, cultural values were transformed in…