Children's block building has long been a focus of psychological research, in part because block building skills are thought to be useful indicators of other abilities such as representational thinking. Block building skills are assumed to progress through developmental stages and a number of measures have been developed to assess these skills. In…

Homelessness is a reality for many families with young children in the United States. Homeless children and youths lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. In 2017, about a third of all people who stayed in a shelter were families with children, and nearly half of children served by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban…

In January 2016, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) released the first 50-state profile on Early Childhood Homelessness as part of an interagency collaboration with multiple departments and agencies participating on the early childhood workgroup of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH). This report updates ED's…

Despite the widely-recognized benefits of early childhood experiences in formal settings that enrich the social and cognitive environments of children, many children--particularly infants and toddlers--spend their days in unregulated (or very lightly regulated) "informal" childcare settings. Over half of all one- and two-year-olds are…

This paper uses the frame of participation as tyranny to trouble the concept of "participating freely in cultural life and the arts" within Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, especially as it relates to the youngest children: when children's experiences are curated and determined by adults,…

Is income during children's earliest years a key determinant of long-term child and adult success in the longer run? The research to date, Christopher Wimer and Sharon Wolf write, suggests that it is. Wimer and Wolf review substantial descriptive evidence that income can enhance child development and later adult outcomes, and that it does so most…

Children under 18 years represent 23 percent of the population, but they comprise 33 percent of all people in poverty. Among all children, 44 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Young children under age 6 years appear to be particularly vulnerable, with 48 percent living in…

Homelessness is a reality for many families with young children in our country. In 2015, a third of all people who stayed in a shelter were in families with children and nearly half of children served by HUD-funded emergency/transitional housing providers in 2015 were age five or younger (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD),…

Symbolic play is a powerful vehicle for supporting emotional development and communication. It embraces all developmental capacities. This article describes how symbols are formed and how emotional themes are symbolized whereby children reveal their understanding of the world, their feelings and relationships, and how they see themselves in the…

Homelessness is a reality for many families with young children in the country. In fact, infancy is the period of life when a person is at highest risk of living in a homeless shelter in the United States (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 6th Annual Homelessness Report, 2012). Every day more and more Americans understand…

Previous work on the long-term effects of early reading focuses on whether children can read early (i.e. capability) not on whether this is beneficial (i.e. optimality). The Luke Effect is introduced to predict long-term reading development as a function of when children learn to read. A review of correlational, intervention, and comparative…

This study examined changes in the administrative prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in Utah children from 2002 to 2008 by record source (school and health), age (four, six, and eight), and special education classification. Prevalence increased 100% with 1 in 77 children aged eight identified with ASD by 2008. Across study years and age…

This document, based on the statistical yearbook, "Children in Israel 2014," presents data on the population of young children in Israel. The document presents a current picture of the well-being of young children in Israel intended to assist policy-makers and practitioners to understand the situation of this group of children and to…

Objective: This study examined the effect of event repetition on the amount and nature of story-grammar produced by children when recalling the event. Method: Children aged 4 years (N=50) and 7 years (N=56) participated in either 1 or 6 occurrences of a highly similar event where details varied across the occurrences. Half the children in each age…

Background: Non-word repetition (NWR) tasks have been found to correlate with language skills and to discriminate between groups of typically developing (TD) children and children with speci?c language impairment (SLI) across languages. Aims: The main aim was to develop an easily-administered NWR screening test that could discriminate between…