Child Development Perspectives最新文献

Widespread access to digital and social media has drastically altered the nature of youth’s interpersonal connections. In this context, the opportunities children and adolescents have to help people around them are rapidly evolving. In this article, we review emerging literature on how digital media influences youth’s prosocial development in new ways. Then we propose the next steps for advancing the field’s understanding of youth’s prosocial behavior in the digital age. We advocate for extending existing measures to capture experiences that are increasingly relevant for children and adolescents today, with a focus on current events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and social and political activism. We also provide a research agenda to advance the understanding of prosocial development.

Acne is a hallmark of adolescence, affecting 85% of youth between the ages of 12 and 25 worldwide. Perhaps because of its ubiquity and minimal impact on physical functioning, acne is often dismissed as a time-delimited cosmetic nuisance and has been summarily neglected by developmental scientists. However, emerging evidence suggests that acne is associated with clinically significant psychological adjustment problems, including depression and anxiety. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that bridges developmental and dermatological science, we reposition acne as a prominent source of psychological maladjustment and health disparities in adolescence. Specifically, we propose that females and youth with darker skin may be disproportionately affected by the pernicious psychological effects of acne. Reconceptualizing adolescent acne as a developmentally and psychologically meaningful dermatologic disease with effects shaped by culture and health care disparities will advance our understanding of youth’s mental health.

The propensity to use a spatial framework to organize other pieces of information is a widespread phenomenon that permeates humans’ representation of diverse concepts, including numerical quantities. Developmental studies on numerical cognition have revealed that humans possess a system for abstract quantity representation that is functional at birth and connects to a spatial representation system. Human infants, children, and adults link increases and decreases in numerical quantity to corresponding increases and decreases of spatial extent, as well as to lateralized right/left spatial positions, respectively. In this article, I discuss the origins of number-space mappings, their presence throughout development, and their functional properties. I also argue that number-space mappings reflect inborn biases, possibly shared across other species, that support both efficient magnitude processing and serial learning.

Modern developmental science is informed by several shared principles and adopts a lifespan approach that goes from infancy to senescence. Increasingly, disciplines outside psychology are adopting research frameworks (e.g., fetal origins, developmental origins of health and disease, first 1000 days) that prioritize prenatal experience as a driver of children's long-term health and developmental outcomes. Despite originating in medical literatures, these new frameworks share many of the core tenets of modern developmental theories. However, they also raise new questions and provoke a broader consideration of developmental influences, outcomes, and contexts. In this article, we describe these frameworks and consider how they align with, differ from, and inform modern developmental science.

Scholarship on critical consciousness frames how people who are more marginalized deeply analyze, feel empowered to change, and take collective action to redress perceived inequities. These three dimensions correspond to critical reflection, motivation, and action, respectively. In this article, we aim to recenter action in scholarship on critical consciousness, given the disproportionate attention that has been paid to reflection. To achieve this aim, we review empirical associations between critical action and positive developmental consequences among more marginalized youth, highlight promising practices to foster critical action, and identify questions and key areas for inquiry. We hope this article motivates a recentering of critical action in scholarship, policy, and practice on critical consciousness.

Mathematical competence in middle childhood predicts socioeconomic status in adulthood. Therefore, it is important to understand the components that constitute mathematical competence from kindergarten to sixth grade. Using an analytical approach, in this article, I identify three components: understanding numbers, understanding mathematical symbols and their relevant principles, and converting problems into mathematical expressions. Evidence suggests that all three components significantly predict children's mathematical competence. However, the interrelations of the three components, as well as their unique contributions to overall mathematical competence, remain largely unexaed, with most studies focusing on only one of the three components. Exploring such issues can give researchers and educators a more comprehensive view of mathematical competence in childhood, and can lead to reconsiderations of important theoretical issues. The three-component framework of mathematical competence may also give educators insights on how to improve the mathematical competence of future generations.

Parental incarceration is a socially relevant topic with substantial implications for children, yet it is understudied by child development scholars. About 2.6 million U.S. children currently have a parent who is incarcerated, and by age 14, one in 14 U.S. children experiences a resident parent leaving for jail or prison. In this developmentally oriented review, we summarize research on associations between parental incarceration and child well-being, and suggest areas where developmental scientists can contribute. While most analyses of large population-based U.S., datasets have found that experiencing paternal incarceration typically has detrimental implications for child well-being, especially as children grow older, analyses of maternal incarceration have yielded less consistent findings. Longitudinal population-based developmental studies focusing on parental incarceration, especially early in life through adulthood, are urgently needed to answer basic questions, clarify mixed findings, inform policies, and develop interventions for vulnerable children.

The study of prosocial behaviors—actions that benefit others—continues to evolve in sophisticated ways. Such actions are important for understanding moral development, as well as health and behavioral well-being, and have implications for addressing societal and global challenges (e.g., hate crimes, cooperation, peace). In this article, we briefly summarize research on prosocial behaviors during adolescence, a period of age-related changes in these actions that is considered important in the development of moral identity. We review work that conceptualizes these behaviors as global and unidimensional, and present the limits of these early conceptions. We also present a heuristic model that supports a multidimensional approach integrating target, context, motives, culture, and development, and we summarize evidence for the model (with a focus on U.S. Latino/a youth). We assert that a more nuanced approach to the study of prosocial behaviors positions scholars to understand prosocial development more thoroughly and develop effective intervention efforts designed to foster such desirable qualities.

In this review, I summarize what we know about the development of sex-related differences in spatial skills, their potential malleability, and their possible causes. Current evidence suggests that sex differences increase in size with age, at least for skills with assessments suitable for use across development. However, male advantages vary from nonexistent to substantial, depending on the skills assessed, task parameters, and culture. Training and practice can improve spatial skills, although interventions tested so far do not eliminate the male advantage (when there is one). The complex pattern of increases with age, task variation, and cultural variation challenges efforts to theorize about causation. Progress requires identifying the underlying cognitive and neural structure of the spatial domain, developing reliable and valid assessment tools suitable for use across wide age ranges, gathering large datasets from a variety of cultural settings, and identifying and investigating specific mechanisms for growth and change.