Child development最新文献

Increasing global diversity of children and families calls for developmental sciences to incorporate the dynamic interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, and other contextual experiences. However, navigating ecological and cultural theories defies our disciplinary-based training. Promoting interdisciplinary multisector research is necessary. With parenting as a lens, I described my journey toward increasingly interdisciplinary and multisector research. Interactions among ethnicity, community, and socioeconomic status varied by developmental stage and context, resulting in revisiting conceptualizations of parenting. Further, through research-practice partnerships, cultivating a sense of purpose, apart from educational and career goals, emerged as significant for maintaining academic engagement and navigating an unstable and insecure job market. As president of SRCD (2021–2023), I emphasized and catalyzed transdisciplinary, multisector research to support children and families.

The present study examined the role of gene–environment correlations in the association between parent–child similarity in negative emotionality and addressed whether it is mediated by negative or warm parenting, assessed when children were between 7 and 15 years old. Participants included 843 children from 493 families in the Colorado Adoption Project (48% female, 95% White, 5% Hispanic). Results indicated that passive rGE may contribute to associations between parents' and children's negative emotionality assessed at age 16 years. Additionally, negative parenting partially mediated the association between biological mothers' negative emotionality and children's negative emotionality. Results were not consistent with evocative rGE. Studies of parent–child similarity should consider plausible alternative hypotheses, such as gene–environment correlation, rather than assuming environmental mediation.

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 active control (language) condition. The 6-week intervention (pretest-March 2023; posttest-May 2023) consisted of an ecologically valid implementation, with parents integrating flexible activities into their routines. Pre- and post-intervention assessments measured children's numerical skills. Medium effects were observed on transcoding and ordering skills, providing causal evidence for the impact of the home numeracy environment on children's numeracy. This study highlights the potential of ecologically valid interventions to support early numeracy in daily life.

Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather information for learning. Here, caregiver-infant dyads (N = 222, 2-6-months-old, all female caregivers; data collected 2022–2023) in South Africa and Malawi engaged in naturalistic play before their interactions were hand-annotated to measure caregiver predictability and infant gaze. In both countries, temporal variation in caregiver predictability shaped infant looking dynamics—infants attended to specific sensory signals (η² = 0.04) and specific timepoints (η² = 0.10) that were useful for them based on their caregiver's typical behavior. These findings provide a framework by which the predictability of caregiver behavior may shape fundamental, early optimization of visual attention for learning in infancy and later cognitive development.

This study distinguished the cognitive and affective components of advanced theory of mind (AToM) and their distinct contributions to narrative reading comprehension (NRC) across different grades. In a longitudinal study (Time 1: April 2023) involving 344 Chinese children from Grades 2–5 (174 girls, M_age = 9.60 years), results indicated that both AToM types develop in middle grades (2nd and 3rd) and stabilize by upper grades (4th and 5th), with affective AToM consistently higher than cognitive AToM. After accounting for 10 confounding variables, cognitive AToM was crucial in middle grades, enhancing NRC through metacognitive awareness of reading, while affective AToM became more prominent in upper grades, facilitating NRC through reading transportation. These findings provide insights for age-appropriate educational interventions to foster literary appreciation.