Child Development Perspectives最新文献

Extensive research has established that fathers’ engagement in parenting benefits children, but few studies have described how fathers contribute to child development even before birth. In this article, we consider both direct and indirect pathways through which expectant fathers shape child development during the prenatal period. Regarding direct pathways, we review work on expectant fathers’ contributions to child development through genetic and epigenetic processes, as well as neuroendocrine mechanisms. Regarding indirect pathways, we outline ways in which expectant fathers indirectly influence child development through the couple relationship. In so doing, we seek to provide a foundation from which to formulate future lines of inquiry on the role of expectant fathers in child development. This research can inform clinical interventions and policies geared toward improving the early caregiving environment and child development.

The study of children’s prospective memory has gained new momentum over the past 20 years and is now an active area of research in cognitive development. Yet, this resurgence has been accompanied by significant challenges that offer important lessons and insights for other areas of developmental science. In this article, I provide an overview and theoretical accounts of the development of children’s prospective memory. I then describe three puzzling findings that remain unresolved in children’s development of this kind of memory: (1) the contradictory effects of delay length on prospective memory performance, (2) why reminders sometimes fail to improve prospective memory performance, and (3) why parent reports and behavioral measures of prospective memory might fail to correlate. I discuss how each challenge can be applied broadly to other areas of children’s development. I conclude by highlighting challenges and opportunities as the field moves forward.

Across diverse cultural contexts, children and adults believe in the existence of religious and supernatural unobservables (e.g., gods, angels) as well as scientific and natural unobservables (e.g., germs, oxygen). In this article, we explore the role of cultural input and testimony in children’s developing beliefs in supernatural and natural unobservables as real. We review cross-cultural research with children and adults on their beliefs about the ontological status of religious and scientific unobservables and the epistemic patterns associated with these beliefs. Based on this evidence, we argue that cultural input plays a central role in the development of belief about supernatural unobservables as real, whereas it plays a less critical role in the development of belief about natural unobservables as real. In the latter case, we argue that direct experiences with the natural world combine with children’s naive theories to generate beliefs about natural unobservable entities and processes as real.

Every aspect of child development—from cognition to relationships—is shaped by macrolevel ideologies (e.g., white supremacy, patriarchy) that reflect the social hierarchies and embedded power structures of society. While ecological theories have long underscored the impact of macrosystems and cultures on humans, the field of child development has tended to overemphasize microsystems and often overlooks how ideologies of power shape developmental processes. In this article, we situate child development within and in response to the ideological context, which directs the field’s attention away from “fixing” individuals and microsystems and toward disrupting the macro-ideologies that shape them. We ground this article in research on resistance and accommodation to such ideologies, revealing that humans have a natural capacity to resist what gets in the way of their ability to survive and thrive. We discuss questions that are necessary to address when integrating resistance and accommodation in the study of child development.

Fostering gratitude is often among the socialization goals parents hold for their children. In this article, we explore work that portrays gratitude as a complex socioemotional process that occurs during a moment in time and becomes more frequent, integrated, and rich with development. Researchers have identified at least four parent socialization practices that may foster children’s gratitude: modeling, daily scaffolding, niche selection, and conversations with children about gratitude moments and missed opportunities for gratitude. Parent training tools based on this work have yielded modest results. More work is needed to understand further the ways parenting and children’s gratitude are culturally embedded, place the work on gratitude socialization within the larger task of value socialization faced by parents, and explore gratitude as an ontogenetic tool for making meaning of the world around us.

A core attribute of the positive youth development movement has been to nullify negative perceptions of youth’s capacities. Toward this end, measurement and classification systems benefit from efforts to view youth’s capacities as assets contextualized by developmental potentials and opportunities. In this article, we consider this point with respect to whether youth are purposeful. The prevailing sentiment of some researchers holds that few adolescents have a purpose in life, perhaps reifying negative beliefs about their capacity. We assert an alternative view that focuses on sense of purpose, which relies on abundant evidence that adolescents generally perceive themselves to be purposeful, thus offering a more inclusive and positive portrayal of young people. This different perspective also opens the door to new opportunities for studying the development of purpose among marginalized adolescents, as well as how interventions may motivate a sense of purpose among youth.

Learning the meaning of number words is a lengthy and error-prone process. In this review, we highlight outstanding issues related to current accounts of children’s acquisition of symbolic number knowledge. We maintain that, despite the ability to identify and label small numerical quantities, children do not understand initially that number words refer only to sets of discrete countable items, not to other nonnumerical dimensions. We question the presence of a sudden change in children’s understanding of cardinality, and we report the limits of the give-a-number task. We also highlight that children are still learning the directional property of the counting list, even after acquiring the cardinality principle. Finally, we discuss the role that the Approximate Number System may have in supporting the acquisition of symbolic numbers. We call for improvements in methodological tools and refinement in theoretical understanding of how children learn natural numbers.

Accumulating information and knowledge is a major task of development. A common assumption is that we build our storehouse of world knowledge, our semantic memory, through direct experience. Although direct experience is involved, to explain fully how we know all that we know, we also must consider processes that allow for integration of information learned in separate yet related episodes of direct learning, as well as inferential processes that operate over integrated representations and permit productive extension of knowledge. In this article, I describe the self-derivation through integration paradigm my colleagues and I developed to model these processes. Using this paradigm, we charted individual and developmental variability throughout childhood and in young adults. Several findings support the contention that the self-derivation through integration paradigm provides a valid model for how we build semantic knowledge, including the observations that performance on the task correlates with and predicts individuals’ world knowledge and academic success.