In the past decade, American and Canadian pediatric societies have recommended that pediatric care clinicians follow a schedule of routine surveillance and screening for young children to detect conditions such as developmental delay, speech and language delays and disorders, and autism spectrum disorder. The goal of these recommendations is to…

This edited international collection re-conceptualizes the place of early childhood education and care services (ECEC) within communities and challenges traditional approaches to family involvement and partnerships in ECEC. Using a range of theoretical positions, the authors present research-based discussions from five countries which challenge…

Children's theatre in the UK is thriving. Debates about why children should watch theatre and what educational, emotional and expressive benefits it can provide inform cultural policy on education. Children aged 4-11 are increasingly taken to watch tailored theatre performances, yet there has been virtually no reflective research on what theatre…

The Promising Practices Network (PPN) on Children, Families and Communities (www.promisingpractices.net) began as a partnership between four state-level organizations that help public and private organizations improve the well-being of children and families. The PPN website, archived in June 2014, featured summaries of programs and practices that…

Kindergarten has changed significantly in the last two decades: children now spend more time being taught and tested on literacy and math skills than they do learning through play and exploration, exercising their bodies, and using their imaginations. Many kindergartens use highly prescriptive curricula geared to new state standards and linked to…

Young children's understanding of the effects of ambiguous and informative messages on a listener's knowledge is studied in two experiments. (PCB)

There is increased interest by parents in communicating with their children about political violence. However, limited attention in the scholarly literature has focused on parent-child communication about war and terrorism. In response, the purpose of this study is to assess, within their respective ecological contexts, American and Northern Irish…

The developmental significance of unresponsive or uncooperative behavior of children in standardized developmental assessments made during the preschool years was investigated. Untestable children were significantly lower than testable children on a wide range of abilities at all ages from 12 through 72 months. (PCB)

Responds to Bryant's comments on Sugarman's article in this issue. (PCB)

Addresses issues important to developmental psychologists in selecting an SES index, specifically discussing (1) the use of Hollingshead's SES indexes; (2) the interrelationships among contemporary SES indexes; and (3) the relationships among these SES indexes and young children's development. (Author/KS)

This case study examined prosodic use in a normally developing child between the ages of 20 and 46 months. Conversational repairs were elicited to examine prosodic stress. Fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration of syllables were measured. Although the subject could repair stress errors, a clear pattern of the development of acoustic cues…

Types of utterances (with locative action utterances specifically differentiated) were evaluated in a language-impaired child tracked between one year, six months and three years of age. Comparison with utterances in other children suggests the importance of such a fine-grained analysis in detecting semantic properties of child language…

This study explored the relationship between sentence disruptions and the length and complexity of sentences spoken by 26 typical children developing grammar. For most children, disrupted sentences tended to be longer and more complex than fluent sentences and the magnitude of the differences in length and complexity was positively correlated with…

The study of children?s peer relationships has been well represented within the pages of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Particularly over the last decade, the pace of publishing studies on peer relationships has increased. Despite this upswing in interest in peer relationships, significant gaps remain. In this article, we focus on a particularly…

Because technology in the home is becoming ever more available, understanding the role of technology in early childhood development is increasingly an opportunity and a concern for educators. This report examines data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, to provide an overview of the role of technology in the…