Play is a fundamental concept in early childhood development and education. As partners in the child's learning, parents play a crucial role in how play is defined, valued, and practised. The present study explores the constructs of parents' beliefs about and engagement in young children's play in two coastal cities in China. A sample of 483…

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…

This study examines the effects of family involvement on the literacy gap between rural and urban Chinese primary students via mediation analysis. Altogether, 1080 students in Grades 1, 3, and 5 were randomly sampled from three urban and three rural primary schools from Shandong and Guizhou Provinces, representing eastern and western China,…

Cross-cultural research on children's theory of mind (ToM) understanding has raised questions about its developmental sequence and relationship with executive function (EF). The current study examined how ToM develops (using the tasks from Wellman & Liu, 2004) in relation to 2 EF skills (conflict inhibition, working memory) in 997 Chinese…