Describes ways that both parents and teachers can instill a love of reading in children. (FL)

This study compares various approaches for incorporating family risk factors in explanatory models of children's achievement over the first 4 years of school. Living in poverty, in a single-parent household, in a household whose primary home language is non-English, and having a mother with less than a high school diploma are well-known risk…

Parents and educators can be described by three predominant personality types as characterized by Kahler's Process Communication Model. Children at-risk are predominantly two other types, and the adults in their lives have little energy to deal with them effectively. Two projects designed to assist the parents of children and youth having…

Organizing the world into masculine and feminine categories is a process called "gender schematicity." High gender schematicity has been linked with children's inclination to self-select out of certain learning opportunities that they deem gender-inappropriate. This study examined gender schematicity among kindergartners and…

This pilot study sought to extend K.L. Hutchinson and J.W. Neuliep's (1993) research regarding the relationship between parental modeling of communication apprehension (CA) and the development of children's CA. Furthermore, the study examined this relationship within the context of Latino families. Subjects were 82 fifth graders attending a…

Views of parents of children, ages 3-37, with disabilities were investigated. Interviews with 51 families addressed a number of questions, including the following: how they learned of their child's disabilities; the best times for the family; reactions of others to their child; what they think their child might not be able to do; and the hardest…

Technology education as a key learning area can be viewed as the designing, making, and appraising of systems, materials, and information. This study examined young Australian children's technological experiences prior to beginning school in order to build on their learning base in curriculum planning. The purposes of the research were to: (1)…

Mastery motivation, usually measured by task persistence, is often used to predict infant competence. This study attempted to clarify how a measure of persistence can be used to facilitate the prediction of competence when examining the relationship between persistence and maternal child-rearing behavior. The measure of persistence used in this…

The Education of the Handicapped Act Amendments of 1986 increased the numbers of families eligible for special needs assistance, yet information concerning these families is minimal. This study explored the needs of families of preschool children with disabilities by comparing their family processes, parenting style, and children's social and…

A study examined school and home variables as contributing factors in the development of communication apprehension in children. Subjects, 89 undergraduate students in 2 sections of a semester-long course in organizational communication and two sections of an introductory level course in interpersonal communication at a midwestern university,…

Focusing on activity preferences at home rather than activity preferences in nursery school, this study examined the relationship between preschoolers' daily activities and spatial abilities. Parents of 52 preschoolers recorded their children's home activities for 7 days. Children were given three measures of spatial ability and one vocabulary…

Data from the longitudinal Berkeley Becoming a Family Project were used to evaluate the possibility that husbands' and wives' working models of attachment are related to the quality of their marital relationship. The main issue investigated was that of whether there are connections between working models of childhood attachment relationships and…

A study undertaken in 1983-85 examined the effects of job loss and financial stress on the cognitive stimulation provided for children in the home and parents' confidence regarding their children's future. Effects of parents' educational level were also considered. It was hypothesized that when parents were unemployed, or had a grim view of the…

The developmental psychology of adolescence emphasizes the central role of identity formation in the adolescent's transition to adulthood. The images of the adolescent carried by family members and the manner in which they are conveyed play a crucial role in the adolescent's identity development. The Q-Sort of Adolescent Delineations (QAD) is…

This study examined the influence of the family environment, day care in the infant's first year, and the fit between child characteristics and the caregiving context as correlates of children's social behavior. Subjects were 39 Caucasian infants and their mothers and caregivers. Mothers and caregivers were asked to rate children's behavior on a…