Child Development Perspectives最新文献

Early care and education (ECE) evolved around two goals: allowing parents of young children to work (the purpose) and promoting early childhood development (the promise). An extensive body of research has examined how ECE promotes child development. A much sparser body of research has studied how ECE access affects families' economic and psychological well-being, particularly from a developmental perspective. These imbalanced literatures have created an incomplete picture of the role of ECE in developmental science, and this gap in knowledge limits the extent to which both the purpose and the promise of ECE can be fulfilled. In this article, we argue that developmental researchers should pay more attention to the parent and family outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that depend on stable, high-quality care (the purpose), and how these downstream cascades influence child development in the short and long term (the promise). While these issues are international, in this article, we focus on the development of and research on ECE in the United States to illustrate how the focus on both the purpose and promise of ECE could expand policies and research in the area.

Adolescents are developmentally distinct from adults in ways that merit a tailored response to juvenile crime. Normative adolescent brain development is associated with increases in risk taking, which may include criminal behavior. Juvenile delinquency peaks during the adolescent years and declines in concert with psychosocial maturation. However, current U.S. approaches to juvenile justice are misaligned with youth's developmental needs and may undermine the very psychosocial development necessary for youth to transition out of crime and lead healthy adult lives. In this article, I discuss empirically supported and efficacious responses to juvenile crime in the United States, as well as opportunities for further developmental reform of the juvenile justice system. Developmentally appropriate responses to juvenile crime prioritize community-based corrections and engage youth's social context in the rehabilitative process. The juvenile justice system shares the responsibility to prepare youth to live fulfilling, productive adult lives; that responsibility can be achieved by partnering with developmental scientists to inform juvenile justice practice and policy.

In this article, we aim to chart a path for a new generation of early care and education (ECE) quality assessments that accurately and equitably capture key inputs to the social–emotional well-being of the diverse population of young children in ECE classrooms in the United States. We zero in on four promising, socially supportive features of center-based ECE settings that are actionable for research, policy, and practice: teachers' classroom behavior-management strategies, their scaffolding of peer interactions, aspects of their own well-being that shape their capacities to support children's social–emotional development, and indicators of bias-free and culturally responsive ECE environments.

Acculturation unfolds over time, but research on acculturation often does not account for developmental processes. Recent studies introduced several novel temporal concepts of acculturation processes to understand more fully how immigrant youth adapt to new cultural contexts. In this review, we describe these new temporal concepts of acculturation: Acculturative timing refers to youth's age at time of migration (chronological timing), the actual start of acculturative changes (which may occur before or after physical migration, also called transition timing), and the deviation in acculturative change from peers and relevant others from the same cohort and context (relative timing). Acculturation tempo is the duration of acculturation processes from start to a defined end. Acculturation pace is the speed at which acculturation occurs. Acculturation synchrony describes whether adaptation unfolds at the same or different times across different spheres of life. We also present empirical evidence for the predictive utility of the new temporal concepts and provide methodological guidelines on how to measure and assess these concepts.

In this article, I review research on adolescent–parent relationships and youth well-being in Turkey. Turkey is a country that has changed rapidly due to urbanization and globalization, and that is characterized by cultural heterogeneity in values, all of which have implications for parent–child relationships. I focus first on parenting styles, and then discuss two dimensions of parenting—warmth and parental control—that are considered more universal and culturally variable, respectively, in terms of their associations with well-being. Overall, research from Turkey is consistent with findings across cultures, showing a positive link between higher warmth and youth well-being. But recent research has challenged the cultural normativity hypothesis, which claims that psychological control may not harm the well-being of children in collectivist cultures because it is perceived as a norm in its sociocultural context. Research from collectivist cultures, including Turkey, suggests that the perception of normativity does not preclude its adversity.

Although a growing literature has linked extreme psychosocial adversity in early development to brain structure and function, recent studies highlight that differences in socioeconomic resources may also affect brain development. In this article, we describe research linking variation in neighborhood context and parenting practices, two contexts shaped by socioeconomic resources, to neural function and structure, particularly in the corticolimbic circuit that supports socioemotional processing. Key considerations include the nested nature of contexts, the developmental timing of exposures, and the role of resilience. While this area of research may help inform policy, scientists and policymakers must be cautious in their interpretation of disadvantage-to-brain research to avoid a deficit-centered approach. Ultimately, this emerging area of research highlights that common and normative variation in experiences in the home and neighborhood is linked to brain structure and function, which may provide proximal mechanisms to understand how and why socioeconomic resources are related to brain development.

In many nations today, the quality of children's diets is low, with numerous children rejecting healthy foods. Fortunately, young children can learn to like and consume new and previously rejected foods with experience, as evidenced by extensive experimental research. In this article, we propose integrating research on children's food preference learning with concepts from developmental science to facilitate generalizability across a wider range of children's characteristics and environments. We review emerging research suggesting that increased consideration of individual differences in responsiveness to food preference learning strategies and ecological validity can facilitate dissemination of evidence-based feeding strategies that fit various children's characteristics and contexts. We incorporate Gottlieb's theory of probabilistic epigenesis to illustrate the importance of considering both individual differences in constitutionally based characteristics and children's naturalistic eating environments since these continually act together to affect eating outcomes. Further research incorporating these factors can help a broader population of parents and caregivers encourage healthy eating in young children's everyday environments.

Community violence has been identified as a pressing public health crisis in the United States. A wealth of research establishes robust connections between youth’s exposure to community violence and an array of negative psychological outcomes. In this article, we argue that developmental scientists need to adopt a more expansive definition of community violence and use a broader range of approaches to understand and intervene in the current epidemic of violence. First, we discuss problems with definitions of community violence in research and propose several types of violent incidents that should no longer be excluded (i.e., gender-based harassment, sexual assault). We also highlight the need for a more nuanced and thorough examination of the dimensions associated with community violence (e.g., severity, physical proximity, relational proximity, chronicity). Next, we discuss methodological problems encumbering research on community violence. Finally, we propose recommendations for research, emphasizing the need to account for children’s intersecting social identities.

Forming and maintaining friendships is one of the most important developmental tasks in adolescence. Supportive and high-quality friendships have been related to positive developmental outcomes and mental health, both concurrently and in the long term. Friendships also protect against negative effects of adverse experiences, such as peer victimization and internalizing behaviors. Despite this ample evidence relating friendships to well-being, we know relatively little about the underlying mechanisms involved. In this article, I review brain imaging research on friendships and highlight its contribution to our understanding of how interactions with friends relate to well-being. Studies suggest that friendships involve reward and motivational processes (involving the ventral striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), and self- and other-related mentalizing processes (involving the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal regions). I conclude with suggestions for research on how neural patterns relate to individual differences in psychosocial outcomes and mental health.