Education, especially early childhood education, is a responsibility that both families and schools share, so much so that children find themselves in two differentiated learning environments. Educational and parenting styles may join forces, sharing values and behaviours that enhance children's development, just as the Montessori Pedagogy has…

Education faces barriers all over the world, which sometimes makes it difficult to look after children's rights and their individual development. Hence, society is clamoring for new practices, and different approaches are emerging, Montessori among them. Despite the fact that this approach was developed to attend to the poor strata, nowadays it is…

The concept of assemblage, drawing on the posthuman theorisations of Deleuze and Guattari, delineates a dynamic and new materialist approach to an event. In this approach, desires, material agency and (de)(re)territorialisation emerge as key concepts, and open ways to understand the school classroom in early childhood as a territory where lines of…

This study deals with detecting the difficulties that prospective teachers encounter in recognising and analysing children's ideas in the domains of social studies and science. It qualitatively analyses the reports written by 94 third-year Early Childhood Education degree students, while they were taking courses on "Teaching the natural…

Learning to descend stairs requires motor and cognitive capacities on the part of infants and opportunities for practice and assurance of safety offered by caregivers. The American Academy of Pediatrics prescribes the age strategy to teach toddlers to safely descend stairs but without much consideration for individual differences in infants'…

The aim of the present study was to provide a comprehensive model for assessing family context and to explore the reliability and factor structure of the Haezi Etxadi-Family Assessment Scale (HE-FAS 4), an exhaustive measure covering variables related to family context influencing child development, described over the past two decades. A sample of…

Research Findings: The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between social play and involvement in the outdoor preschool environment. The study included 173 children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years (M[subscript age] = 3.95, SD = 0.82) and attending 19 preschools in the Basque Country (Spain). A total of 51 teachers…

This study presents the descriptive data of a family context assessment carried out using a new instrument which includes a wide range of variables identified in recent scientific literature as influencing children's psychological development. Participants were 772 families with children aged between 7 and 11. The results reveal variability…

Offering an in-depth exploration of the distinctive features of the play development and learning of toddlers, this book provides useful materials, strategies and tools that can be used by practitioners supporting toddlers at this significant age. The book explores the context and concepts of wellbeing and is ideal for early years practitioners,…

This paper presents the results of an assessment and preventive education experience involving 50 families with children aged 2. The families were assessed by means of an interview conducted during a home visit, and were subsequently provided with a series of everyday parenting guidelines. The results provide empirical evidence of the…

The first years of life lay the foundations for a child's future development and learning. Many countries have increased their financial support for provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) over the past years. More recently, the focus of debate has been shifting from expanding access to affordable ECEC to enhancing its quality. A…

Although we rarely hear about it, children sometimes aggress against their parents. This is a difficult topic to study because abused parents and abusive children are both reluctant to admit the occurrence of child-to-parent aggression. There are very few research studies on this topic, and even fewer theoretical explanations of why it occurs. We…

This study analyzes the influence of socioeconomic status, quality of family context and sibling status on cognitive development in a sample of 551 five-year-old children. The regression analyses confirmed the predictive value of socioeconomic status and quality of family context on cognitive development. The quality of family context mediates the…

This volume contains papers submitted to the 11th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 14-17 May 2013, and papers submitted to the 1st International Distance Partner Conference, organized by the International Research Centre "Scientific Cooperation,"…

When Canadian parents look back on their own lives and the lives of their parents, they see changes across a generation that have profoundly affected their parenting experience, compared to when they themselves were young children. Supports for today's parents must take into consideration these changes that affect the care and nurturing of…