Results of a longitudinal study provide several insights into the idealization of motherhood, the idealization of mothers' relationships with their children in the years from 1 to 4, and the development of children of women who idealize motherhood. In the mother, idealization is associated with low self-esteem, denial of ambivalent feelings and…

The Mental Development Scales: Birth to Three Years are instruments designed to assess developmental levels of young children within a setting familiar to the child. They (1) provide a greater understanding of child behavior and development, (2) serve as a basis for planning an individualized curriculum for each child, and (3) furnish the means…

The purpose of this study was to design a strategy for teaching young children the information expressed in words of selected songs. Out of five classes of from 25 to 30 seven-year-old students, 86 students were selected for observation. The investigator chose 18 songs from a song textbook to be taught for the first 12 weeks of school. During the…

This study examines the relationship between temperament characteristics and skill manifestations or deficits in two groups of kindergarten children, one in Ohio and one in Taipei, Taiwan. Its purposes were to determine if such a relationship did exist and, if so, to see if it obtained cross-culturally. Teachers and parents assessed children on…

To determine what counts as success in a French first grade, an ethnographer investigated what happens when the teacher "applies" her categories of "things students do" to particular situations. The category called "searching" served as an example. To produce a body of data, the teacher commented on videotapes of…

Recent research about children's early personal-social learning and development is reviewed in relation to three basic psychological questions. The first concerns extent of stability or consistency in stylistic patterns of personal-social behavior across infancy, the preschool years, and the early school years. The second concerns current…

The major components of playfulness in kindergarten children are physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor. Children who are highly playful also show high scores in divergent and creative thinking. Piaget postulated that after the age of 7 or 8 this quality is replaced by assimilating the objective facts of the…

Critical assumptions affecting the design of research and intervention for single-parent, mother-headed families of handicapped children involve: extent of father involvement; contribution to child-rearing of persons other than parents; socioeconomic differences between one-parent and two-parent families; heterogeneity of single-parent families;…

Resilience is a universal capacity that allows a child to prevent, minimize, or overcome the damaging effects of adversity. The construct of resiliency, the combination of protective factors that result in resilience, was addressed by the International Resilience Project (IRP), which set out to explore what parents, caregivers, teachers or…

Dialogical drama with puppets is a specific method of revealing basic cultural values for preschool children. For this study, an interactive performance of a puppet show for young children was videotaped, along with a later performance of the same show by the children. The study compared the techniques used by the adult performers and the children…

The way in which children's transition to primary school is managed can set the stage not only for children's school success, but also their response to future transitions. This study examined transition experiences of young children, their families, and their early childhood and primary school teachers, by means of interviews and detailed…

Many caregivers doubt their ability to provide appropriate play experiences for children with special needs included in their program because some children with disabilities may not have the ability to interact and manipulate toys in a meaningful way. This paper provides guidance in appropriately adapting toys and the play situation to allow many…

This study examined individual differences in young children's understanding of emotion and potential correlates in the domain of family experiences. Participating in the study were 49 children, ages 40 to 75 months from a predominately white, middle to upper class sample. Self-report questionnaires concerning the expression of emotion, management…

An explicit curriculum is one that has been carefully designed, pilot tested by teachers and students, and then presented or published. An implicit curriculum is one that is crafted within the thinking processes of individual teachers but not written down or published, and therefore not able to be replicated by others. Based upon the assumption…

Considering the mother-child relationship as the first in which culturally-related interdependence or independence is learned, this study examined whether the interdependency hypothesis holds for the mother-child relationship in Indonesia. The study focused on the quality of the mother-child relationship, children's daily social interactions, and…