Look at your baby or toddler. They are still learning to eat from a spoon, roll over, stack blocks, walk a few steps, or say their first words. It's hard to imagine that even in these early years, young children are being shaped by the biases that surround them in the world. This is why parenting for social justice begins at birth. Get started…

Conversations with families about understanding and nurturing their young child's development can be both rewarding and challenging. In this article, two seasoned HealthySteps specialists and two HealthySteps physician champions were asked to reflect on this central aspect of their mission in serving infants, toddlers, and families and on what…

This article seeks to connect ethnographic findings from a study on parenting, childcare and early childhood in Chile's Mapuche communities with facets of the LOPI model. From Facet 1, we observe that children are included in social situations from an early stage, which empowers them to learn how to interact through such instances as greeting…

DC:0-5™: Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood (ZERO TO THREE, 2016) emphasizes the centrality of relationships for young children's development and psychopathology. The authors share the story of a young child and his mother to illustrate the use of DC:0-5, with an emphasis on how…

Home visitors provide individualized services to families of infants and young children in their homes. Due to their unique role, home visitors must develop a specialized set of critical competencies--specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes. They therefore require preparation that differs in distinct ways from the preparation typically available…

The standard model of the role of early experience in human development assumes that children's environments in their first years of life are dominant influences on who they become as adults. The standard model favors interventions to improve children's long-term outcomes that start early in life and are intensive in time and attention from…

Nurturing care in early childhood requires responsive interactions and opportunities to learn; however, there are few large-scale programs in low- and middle-income countries that support parents' ability to provide responsive care and activities that help children learn. The Reach Up training program was developed to increase capacity of…

It was a hot and humid afternoon in 2006, 3 months after the opening of the Children's House at the Infinity Children's School in Hong Kong. A 3-year-old boy selected a table-scrubbing activity. He moved erratically and without purpose, accidentally bumping into another child and spilling water on the floor. Meanwhile, a toddler girl strolled…

Long before empirical neurological research validated her insight, Montessori understood that healthy, full-term babies come equipped with a physiological passion for learning. Brain studies have confirmed that most of the brain's development and inner wiring occurs during the first 2 years of life. A newborn's neurons have sparse, weak…

This issue on fathers was conceived as a rallying cry for all professionals to examine their practices of including fathers in their services. For too long, infant mental health professionals have either ignored fathers' important influences on infants and toddlers or have given lip-service to their importance while allowing the status quo of not…

Brenda Jones Harden, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, describes how young children develop the capacity to modulate their emotions and behavior in the first years of life. A child's basic temperament has an impact on self-control, but temper tantrums are a normal part of child…

Jodi Mindell, PhD, the associate director of the Sleep Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, describes how parents and caregivers can help children develop healthy sleeping habits beginning in infancy. Healthy sleep habits are an essential skill for children's overall health and well-being, and they impact family functioning. Dr.…

Children living in poverty or born to teenage parents are at increased risk for developmental delays as well as child neglect. Research has shown that one effective avenue for preventive intervention is teaching parents to recognize and respond to their young children's communicative signals using responsive caregiving behaviors (e.g., warmth and…

Pamela High, MS, MD, co-director of the Infant Behavior, Cry and Sleep Clinic at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, discusses the phenomena of infant crying and the impact it has on families. In most cases, infant crying will peak and resolve in the early months, but infant irritability can increase the risk of maternal…

Infancy is a time of extreme opportunity, but it is also a time of extreme vulnerability, particularly for those reared in high-risk environments. Although infant exposure to any risk is important to understand, this brief focuses on the experience and impact of "trauma," defined as witnessing or experiencing an event that poses a real…