Infant and Child Development最新文献

Toddlerhood is a critical period for children's self-regulation development during which parenting is undoubtedly a key influencing factor. The role that parents especially fathers play in shaping the emergence of self-regulation is still under investigation. This longitudinal study was carried out in 38 families in China, in which toddlers and both parents participated in two waves of observations during home visits, one performed when the toddlers were around 14 months old and another one 12 months later. Children's self-regulation was measured by behaviour control and Stroop tasks. Parental positive and negative discipline was coded by videotaped parent–child interactions. Results indicated that the mothers showed more positive discipline than the fathers at child 14 months, and there were no significant differences in positive and negative discipline between the fathers and mothers at child 26 months, neither in their negative discipline at child 14 months. Only the fathers' positive and negative discipline at child 14 months both significantly predicted toddlers' behaviour control at 26 months—over and above maternal discipline. This study reveals fathers' unique and irreplaceable contributions to children's early self-regulation development.

Emotion regulation is a principal task of early development. The failure to develop effective emotion regulation skills is associated with behavioural, academic, psychological and socioemotional difficulties. Although researchers have studied emotion regulation for decades, work on emotion dysregulation—defined as the inability to maintain emotional control, engage with the environment or recover from distress in a developmentally appropriate manner—is rare and there are discrepancies in its conceptualisation among very young samples. While some scientists refer to emotion dysregulation as if it were a discrete concept, it may be more accurately depicted as a multidimensional system of developmental processes. The National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is a framework that allows researchers to track dysfunction across multiple areas of analysis and may be an ideal system for exploring the multidimensional nature of infant emotion dysregulation. In this paper, we draw on empirical studies to describe how the RDoC framework can be used to support studies of emotion dysregulation in infancy. This proposed model can also serve as a roadmap for future researchers to follow to generate the evidence base for a multidimensional conceptualisation of infant emotion dysregulation and its underlying mechanisms.

Empirical findings and theorizations of both imitation and selective trust offer different views on and interpretations of children's social learning mechanisms. The imitation literature provides ample documentation of children's behavioural patterns in the acquisition of socially appropriate norms and practices. The selective trust literature provides insights into children's cognitive processes of choosing credible informants and what information to learn in future interactions. In this paper, we place together findings from both fields and note that they share analogically similar theoretical underpinnings and offer explanations that are complementary to each other. We contend that children's imitative tendency may be due to their selection of in-group members as cultural experts, who serve as reliable sources of conventional information. Moving forward, we note the importance of evaluating individual differences and cultural factors to provide a more holistic understanding of universality and variation in children's social learning mechanisms.

In two studies, we investigated whether using three-dimensional (3D) manipulatives during assessment aided performance on a variety of preschool mathematics tasks compared to pictorial representations. On measures of children's understanding of counting and cardinality (n = 103), there was no difference in performance between manipulatives and pictures, with Bayes factors suggesting moderate evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. On a measure of children's shape identification (n = 93), there was no difference in performance between objects and pictures, with Bayes factors suggesting moderate evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. These results suggest flexibility in the materials that can be used during assessment. Pictures, or 2D renderings of 3D objects, which can be easily printed and reproduced, may be sufficient for assessing counting and shape knowledge without the need for more cumbersome concrete manipulatives.

Executive functions (EFs) provide a top-down response to stimuli and events in pursuit of a goal. We argue that the extent to which an individual's environment is enriching and a good fit for them influences whether their performance at that moment is towards their upper- or lower-limit of EF ability. We outline the implications of this for interpreting measures of EF. We next argue that a child's sensitivity to the environment, and their caregivers' ability to modulate the environment to improve goodness-of-fit, influences the cumulative effects of the environment in shaping that child's actualised EF ability (the performance level shown in day-to-day situations), and thus their skill development. We therefore recommend that EF interventions be designed to improve children's actualised EF ability by improving their day-to-day environment, while simultaneously helping children modulate their physiological response to environmental challenges, and providing opportunities to practise EF skills in ecologically-valid contexts.

Few empirical studies have explored variability in parenting behaviours observed in a mealtime setting as well as in a play setting with young children. We analysed data from 282 parent–toddler dyads who participated in the Play & Grow study in the United States in 2017–2019. Parent–child interactions were video recorded during play in the laboratory when the child was 18 months old and then during mealtime in the home 6 months later. Standardised coding procedures were used to rate parenting behaviours (sensitivity, cognitive stimulation, positive regard, detachment, intrusive control and negative regard). We describe correlations and differences and variability in parenting behaviour between the two assessments and relative to child sex, gestational age, parent education level, household composition and household income. Detachment was lower on average during play at 18 months compared to during mealtime at 24 months (Cohen's d = −0.40), and the other five parenting behaviours were greater on average during play than during mealtime (d = 0.18–0.43). Sociodemographic characteristics were unrelated to the magnitude of individual differences across contexts in any of the parenting behaviours. Implications for research on associations between parent–child interactions and risk for childhood obesity are discussed.

Although academic benefits of pre-K are well established, the associations between pre-K attendance and social and learning behaviours are less clear. Some research suggests that pre-K attenders may enter and exit kindergarten exhibiting less optimal social and learning behaviours than their non-attending peers, and little attention has been paid to how aspects of kindergarten experiences, like academic rigour, activity settings and teacher–student relationships, may contribute to these patterns of development. The current study addresses these gaps in knowledge by using nationally representative data from the ECLSK:2011 (n = 14,260) to examine the social and learning behaviours of pre-K attenders and nonattenders at kindergarten entry and exit. Our results reveal that pre-K attenders are not consistently underperforming their non-attending peers on social and learning behaviours in kindergarten. However, teachers reported that pre-K attenders exhibited more externalising behaviour problems at kindergarten entry and exit, and non-attenders made greater gains in learning behaviours over the kindergarten year. We also found no evidence of moderation when examining our focal classroom experience variables.