"Research Findings:" Playfulness is an important personality tendency with an important role in the well-being, mental health, and various other aspects of an individual's life. Previous studies have shown that the development of children's playfulness is related to parents' playfulness. However, limited research has been conducted on…

Previous studies have elucidated the positive effect of the quantity and onset age of shared book reading on children's language development. Few studies have addressed the profiles of parental involvement in terms of different key aspects of shared book reading. This study adopted a latent profile analysis to examine the patterns of parental…

This study provides an empirical investigation into the lives of kindergarten-aged left-behind children (LBC) who could not migrate with their parents in rural China. Two research questions are answered as follows: (1) What are the characteristics of the LBC in kindergarten and at home? and (2) How does family cultural capital influence the LBC's…

This study examines the development of children's social skills during the crucial transition from kindergarten to grade school. It explores the long-term connection between parenting styles and children's social skills. This study conducted a three-year longitudinal survey involving 121 children and their parents. The results show that early…

Dialogic reading (DR) is an interactive reading approach that enhances the language development of children. This study aims to extend DR to the shared reading context involving children with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their older siblings and to examine the effects of DR with parents/siblings on the language development…

The study investigated how parental belief and family socio economic status (SES) were related to the home literacy environment and to early literacy-related skills in a foreign language (English). Eighty-six Chinese children in kindergarten (Mage = 5 years 5 months, 44 girls) were assessed on English phonological awareness, English receptive…

We examined the relations between mothers' reading skills, home literacy environment (HLE), and children's emergent literacy skills and word reading and whether their relations vary across urban and rural contexts in China. Four hundred third-year kindergarten Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 74.50 ± 3.77 months) were recruited from Jining (N…

Aims: To determine the associations between COVID-19 school closures and school readiness skills for Chinese kindergarteners. Design: We utilized the natural experimental condition created by local COVID-19 outbreaks in 2022 (Study 1) to compare school readiness skills of children whose kindergartens were closed for 5 months (Group 1) with…

Despite the well-documented phenomenon that Chinese parents tend to be actively involved in their young children's education, few studies have explored how Chinese parents manifest math involvement and how their practices operate in early math learning at home. This study investigated Chinese mothers' teaching behavior and its relation to child…

Research Findings: This study explored the developmental pattern, latent profiles of young children's sympathy development, and the associated family factors. Altogether 1408 Shanghai parents completed the Children's Sympathy Assessment Scale-Parents (CSAS-P). The descriptive results indicated an age-related increase in sympathy and a significant…

This study examined the links between maternal caregiving burden and maternal and child adjustment, and whether these links were mediated and moderated by maternal coping strategies. Cross-sectional data were collected from 173 Chinese families with kindergarten aged children with special needs in Hong Kong, China (mean age = 61.53 months; 72% of…

To relieve young children of a burden and to encourage informal literacy practices such as shared book reading, the Chinese Ministry of Education implemented an early education policy that forbids the teaching of formal literacy (e.g., Chinese character recognition and Pinyin) as well as more ambitious literacy teaching practices (e.g., Teaching…

We examined the developmental relationship between cognitive-linguistic skills (nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming [RAN]), home environment factors (direct teaching, shared book reading, access to literacy resources, parents' expectations, family's socioeconomic status [SES]), and pinyin letter knowledge in…

This study examined whether kindergarten children's psychological needs satisfaction would mediate the relationships between parental scaffolding and children's use of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategic behaviours. One hundred and thirty Chinese kindergarten children and their parents participated in the study. Parental scaffolding and…

Parental beliefs about play and learning are part of the "belief-context" of early childhood development and can thus make a key difference for the child. Previous studies have focused on cross-cultural comparisons, and therefore have neglected intra-cultural variations. This study sampled 163 Chinese mothers with children aged two to…