In this article, we examined young Finnish children's social relationships, characteristics of their parents' social networks and the role of parental networks in children's peer relationships. We drew on the data collected from a Finnish longitudinal study known as Steps to the Healthy Development and Well-Being of Children. The data from two…

This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children's vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance…

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the US but also in Finland which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find that: (i) the positive association between parental income and off-spring probability of inventing is greatly…

Private supplementary tutoring in the form of preparatory courses to university entrance examinations is present in Finland alongside public higher education (HE). We explore the participation in preparatory courses. Our data derive from the university undergraduate subsample (n = 2969) of a larger cross-sectional national survey targeting…

A rich home literacy environment (HLE) fosters students' academic achievement. However, the link between HLE and children's reading comprehension is unclear. This study examined the effects of HLE factors on children's reading comprehension through a meta-analysis of 59 studies conducted between 1998 and 2018. Results of the meta-analysis…

Recent national and international evidence suggests that the wellbeing of young people in the UK has decreased. In 2018, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) asked participating pupils a number of questions about their wellbeing, and some of the measures can be tracked over time. Based on PISA 2015 and 2018, this report…

Maternal responsive and directive speech to children at ages 0;10 and 2;0 was investigated by applying a procedure frst introduced by Flynn and Masur (2007) to a new language community (Finnish). The issues examined were consistency and stability over time, and also the role of responsiveness and directiveness in child linguistic development at…

Recent national and international evidence suggests that the wellbeing of young people in the UK has decreased. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 national reports for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Sizmur et al., 2019a; Sizmur et al., 2019b; Sizmur et al., 2019c) identified cause for concern for 15-year-old…

Compassion is known to predict prosocial behavior and moral judgments related to harm. Despite the centrality of compassion to social life, factors predicting adulthood compassion are largely unknown. We examined whether qualities of parent-child-relationship, namely, emotional warmth and acceptance, predict offspring compassion decades later in…

The aim of this study was to examine the role of mothers' (language minority mothers, LM, n = 49, and Finnish-speaking mothers, MP, n = 368) parenting styles and maternal help with their children's homework in the children's (mean age 11.43 years) literacy skills at fourth grade in Finland. In addition, the moderating effect of a child's gender on…

The present study examined adolescents' and mothers' temperament types and their roles in the socioemotional functioning of early adolescents. A total of 869 sixth-grade students and 668 mothers participated in the study. The students rated their temperament and socioemotional functioning and the mothers rated their own temperament. Latent profile…

Finland is officially a bilingual country but it is in practice multilingual. In the current study, we examined how mothers and fathers of mixed-language families linguistically identified themselves and others, and how ideological discourses and concepts historically and socially situated in Finland circulated through the parents' talk. The…

Reciprocal associations between the Big Five personality traits and parenting stress--including both parents' feelings of their distress and perception of their incompetence as parents--were studied with 248 participants (49% of which were males). Longitudinal data, collected at ages 33/36, 42 and 50 years, were used. Cross-lagged path analysis…

In this study happiness and depression in 737 12-year-old Finnish children were predicted by relationships with family members and other people, the number of close friends and their experiences of parental fighting and drinking. There were no differences in happiness between the genders, but the girls were more depressed than the boys. Low…

This study investigated the longitudinal associations between children's academic performance and their mothers' affect, practices, and perceptions of their children in homework situations. The children's (n = 2,261) performance in reading and math was tested in Grade 1 and Grade 4, and the mothers (n = 1,476) filled out questionnaires on their…