Child Development Perspectives最新文献

Research on African American youth's emotional development provides an incomplete understanding of the cultural influences that shape emotion-related skills such as emotion expression, regulation, and understanding. In this article, I propose the multiple cultural frameworks of triple quandary theory to characterize the nature of mainstream cultural experiences and minority cultural experiences in current research on emotional development in African American youth. I also discuss Afrocultural ethos as an aspect of African American cultural experiences that shapes African American emotional development, using affect and orality as examples that can be explored and embedded within emotional development research. Finally, I describe important factors for researchers to consider in the study of Afrocultural ethos in affective developmental science.

Although executive functions (EFs) have been identified as a cornerstone of cognitive development, knowledge of this fundamental ability in children is based primarily on research with North American and Western European samples of middle to high socioeconomic status (SES). In this article, we highlight advances in research on developmental EFs from Latin American regions, an understudied area that provides a unique context important to understanding EFs. Our narrative review suggests the potential for both universality (e.g., increasing cohesion and longitudinal stability among EFs' task performance, general positive associations with age, and other social and cognitive abilities) and cultural specificity in EF development (i.e., contributions of SES, educational environments, parenting styles, and cultural values). It is important to consider the development of EFs outside of typically examined samples—and specifically within Latin American countries—to understand more thoroughly these abilities and to generate interventions that consider cultural context.

Current approaches to supporting students in the transition to elementary school fail to meet the needs of Latinx immigrant children and their families in the United States. Typical approaches place the responsibility on families to help their children adapt to the expectations of their teacher, classroom, and school without recognizing the specific barriers to participation faced by Latinx immigrant parents. In this article, we describe these barriers and consider the ways community-based practice can support and prioritize co-constructed partnerships among teachers, schools, parents, and communities.

In the past two decades in the United States, research has surged on familism, a multidimensional construct encompassing attitudes and behaviors related to strong attachment, identification, and obligation to the family. In this article, we define familism and argue that it is a crucial way for adolescents to contribute to their social world and achieve a sense of role fulfillment. We also present examples from key studies highlighting the advantages and potential challenges of familism for adolescent adjustment. Lastly, we discuss conceptual and methodological issues to advance the study of familism.

Educational identity has been studied increasingly in the past decades since school is a structured context that shapes adolescent identity formation. Across the academic years, adolescents learn to position themselves in terms of their education and schooling, perceiving these entities as more or less relevant for their self-formation. In this article, I analyze educational identity in the context of personal identity formation in adolescence through longitudinal studies from Japan, the Netherlands, and Romania that used the identity process approach. I also examine the role educational systems play in educational identity trajectories, outlining the limits of personal intentionality when adolescents make educational choices. In addition, I address the relations of educational identity development with two important outcomes of education: academic achievement and vocational development. I conclude that educational identity formation reflects the freedom or coercion that country-specific educational systems teach adolescents through educational tracking and the timing of educational transitions.

Familial racial-ethnic socialization (RES) helps youth build tools of cultural resilience by providing messages regarding race and ethnicity that enable them to negotiate and survive the demands of a racialized society. Thus, RES is an important caregiving task for historically minoritized families, including Latine families in the United States. In this article, we review research on RES in Latine families, which has focused primarily on RES processes in middle childhood to adolescence, to provide an evidence-informed conceptual model delineating the youth, parental, dyadic/familial, and sociohistorical factors that shape how Latine families engage in RES. We argue that it is important to focus on which RES messages are provided, how families provide these messages, and the concomitant family processes that support RES efforts that result in culturally adaptive outcomes. We also review research on this topic to identify where evidence supports the role of these factors in the delivery of RES and to identify new directions for research and intervention.

In this article, I argue that the scalability and effectiveness of universal school-based mindfulness interventions for adolescents will always be limited by the high motivational commitment required to meditate. Mindfulness interventions rely on a single and demanding health behavior—namely, meditation—to cultivate mindfulness skills. But unlike traditional mindfulness interventions delivered in clinics to self-selected adults who are motivated to manage personal problems through meditation, universal school-based mindfulness interventions are delivered to all adolescents regardless of their desire to meditate. I review evidence from multiple randomized controlled trials of universal school-based mindfulness interventions to show that adolescents consistently report low levels of engagement in meditation and that many interventions have failed to improve adolescents' mental health. I propose that universal mindfulness interventions eliminate meditation entirely and focus on instilling contemplative viewpoints conducive to flourishing, and that the skill of mindfulness is taught only to adolescents who want to meditate.

Communication is commonly viewed as connecting people through conscious symbolic processes. Infants have an immature communication toolbox, raising the question of how they form a sense of connectedness. In this article, we propose a framework for infants' communication, emphasizing the subtle unconscious behaviors and autonomic contingent signals that convey drives, emotions, and a sense of connection, facilitating the formation of primal social bonds. Our developmental model emphasizes the importance of diverse modes of communication and their interplay in social interactions during infancy. The framework leverages three levels of communication—autonomic, behavioral, and symbolic—and their different maturational pathways. Initially, infants' social communication relies on autonomic responses and a dynamic behavioral repertoire, which evolve during the first year of life, supporting the emergence of symbolic communication. This extended communication framework highlights infants' role as proactive communicating agents and allows for tracing communicative developmental cascades back to their origins.

The ability to predict upcoming events is essential in infancy because it enables babies to process information optimally and have successful goal-directed interactions with their environment. In this article, we examine how infants generate predictions in perception, cognition, and action, and address whether and how their predictions are motivated and affected by their motor development. Our synthesis of research demonstrates that infants form predictions in the perception, cognition, and action domains based on perceived statistical information, pre-existing and newly generated knowledge, and internal motor models. Our analysis reveals that infants' increasing fine and gross motor experiences have a moderating impact on the elaboration of the different bases for predictions. Based on this, we conclude that new motor experiences enable infants to constantly improve the bases from which they generate and update their predictions.