The goals of this study were to investigate (a) the dyadic relations of mothers' and children's perceptions of children's anxiety symptoms across development, (b) whether maternal perceptions of children's anxiety serve as a mediator of the association between maternal anxiety and child anxiety, and (c) whether sensitive/structured parenting…

Observational studies have shown that caregiver sensitivity predicts child language skills. These studies, however, have entirely relied on between-family designs (single parent-child dyad per family), which cannot rule out the contribution of shared family confounds (e.g., genetics, books in home). The current study investigates whether observed…

Past meta-analyses show that both child-mother and child-father attachment insecurity are independently and jointly associated with more externalizing behaviors in children. Little is known, however, on the ways that different types of insecure attachment independently and jointly predict the development of externalizing behaviors over time.…

Purpose: Past research shows that parentally responsive behavior toward the child positively influences language development in both neurotypical children and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including those with fragile X syndrome (FXS); however, most studies have focused exclusively on the mother--child relationship.…

In this study, northern Canadian rural and Indigenous parents provided valuable information about the self-initiated writing that their two- through nine-year-old children do at home. In interview responses, participating parents told stories about the writing materials and spaces they make available to children for writing. They talked about how…

This article uses an unconventional format to explore the role of parent and nature and the development of a young child's ecological identity. It follows journal entries from a mother observing her young son, Julian, as he explores, interacts with, and learns from the Stawamus River on the west coast of British Columbia. By creating questions,…

Purpose: This study investigates how the variables of culture and hearing status might influence the amount of parent-child talk families engage in throughout an average day. Method: Seventeen Vietnamese and 8 Canadian families of children with hearing loss and 17 Vietnamese and 13 Canadian families with typically hearing children between the ages…

Research on this intervention program aimed to address whether digital technology (i.e., apps on tablets) contributes to struggling early readers' (4-6 years old) on-task behavior and level of engagement while learning prerequisite emergent literacy skills (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, word recognition and decoding). The research also…

There is an ongoing need for literature that identifies the effects of broad contextual risk on school readiness outcomes via family mediating mechanisms. This is especially true amongst diverse and urban samples characterized by variability in immigration history. To address this limitation, family profiles of sociodemographic and contextual risk…

A growing body of theoretical and empirical work has been attempting to answer the questions of how and how much of the effects of children's early experience may depend on their inner characteristics. Theory and evidence suggest that some children, notably those with difficult temperaments, are more susceptible to both negative and positive…

The present studies test 2 hypotheses: (1) that pedagogical contexts especially convey generic information (Csibra & Gergely, 2009) and (2) that young children are sensitive to this aspect of pedagogy. We examined generic language (e.g., "'Elephants' live in Africa") in 3 studies, focusing on informational versus narrative children's…

The current study aimed to examine infant sleep duration as a moderator of the relations between maternal sensitivity and child externalizing and internalizing symptoms, in a prospective longitudinal design. Fifty-five Caucasian infants (33 girls) took part in 2 assessments, at 1 and 4 years. Maternal sensitivity was rated at 1 year, based on…

The aim of this report was to investigate the associations between attachment state of mind, romantic attachment style, and indices of maternal functioning in two relational spheres: the mother-child relationship (i.e., maternal sensitivity and child attachment security) and the marital relationship (i.e., mothers' and their partners' marital…

Research Findings: Parents' meta-emotion philosophy guides their approach to teaching their children about emotions (J. M. Gottman, L. F. Katz, & C. Hooven, 1997) and is measured with the Emotion-Related Parenting Styles Self-Test-Likert (Gottman et al., 1997, modified by J. Hakim-Larson, A. Parker, C. Lee, J. Goodwin, & S. Voelker, 2006).…

An ecological approach, emphasizing the importance of understanding multiple contexts for learning, underpins this study of libraries as activity spaces for young children's literacy participation. Five libraries serving a diversity of communities were the subject of ethnographic investigation incorporating participant observation, visual…