Developmental delays in cognitive flexibility early in elementary school can potentially increase vulnerability for subsequent externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. The first goal of the current study was to identify latent subgroups of children characterized by different developmental trajectories of cognitive flexibility throughout…

Executive functions (EF) are domain-general cognitive skills that predict foundational academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. However, less is known about the relation between EFs and science achievement. The nature of this relation might be explained by the theory of mutualism, which states that development is the result of complex and…

Previous work has provided evidence that both merit and social relationships guide resource distribution in children. However, no prior studies have addressed the question of how children as third-party distributors balance the 2 factors when they are in conflict with one another. Two studies tested 7-year-old Chinese children's allocation of 3…

Based on data from 710 2-parent families enrolled in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this article examined dyadic and family-level interdependence among indicators of family members' competence over time. A cross-lagged model that included children and both parents was…

The development of early childhood self-regulation is often considered an early life marker for later life successes. Yet little longitudinal research has evaluated whether there are different trajectories of self-regulation development across children. This study investigates the development of behavioral self-regulation between the ages of 3 and…

Although the strong link between maternal education and children's outcomes is one of the most well-established findings in developmental psychology (Reardon, 2011; Sirin, 2005), less is known about how young, low-income children are influenced by their mothers completing additional education. In this research, longitudinal data from the Head…

Consistent with models of environmental sensitivity (Pluess, 2015), research suggests that the effects of parents' behaviors on child adjustment are stronger among children who struggle to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors compared with children with better self-regulation. This study extended prior research by assessing maternal…

Data from a large prospective longitudinal study (n = 1,239) was used to investigate the association between observed sensitive parenting in early childhood and children's representations of family relationships as measured by the Family Drawing Paradigm (FDP) in first grade as well as the extent to which these representations partially mediate…

Using data ("n" = 3,790 with 2,119 in the 3-year-old cohort and 1,671 in the 4-year-old cohort) from 353 Head Start centers in the Head Start Impact Study, the only large-scale randomized experiment in Head Start history, this article examined the impact of Head Start on children's cognitive and parent-reported social-behavioral outcomes…

Change in strategies is often mentioned as a source of memory development. However, though performance in working memory tasks steadily improves during childhood, theories differ in linking this development to strategy changes. Whereas some theories, such as the time-based resource-sharing model, invoke the age-related increase in use and…

Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in the world they see. Previous work on gesture's role in instruction has used gestures that either point to or trace paths on objects, thus providing support for this…

Little research has examined whether social information processing (SIP) measures from early childhood predict externalizing problems beyond the shared association with familial risk markers. In the present study, family antecedents and first-grade externalizing behaviors were studied in relation to preschool and 1st-grade SIP using data from…

The goal of this article was to investigate an indirect form of intergroup differentiation in children in the context of racial attitudes: the preference for ingroup members who interact positively with other ingroup members rather than with outgroup members. Study 1 confirmed this general hypothesis with preschool and 1st-grade children,…

Presents a framework for relating degree of bilingualism to aspects of linguistic awareness. Found the more fully bilingual a child was, the better his or her performance on metalinguistic tasks requiring high levels of analysis of knowledge. (SKC)

Classroom emotional climate was hypothesized to moderate psychosocial adjustment in 1st grade for children with an early childhood history of anxious solitude. Participants were 1,364 children in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and their mothers, child-care providers, and teachers.…