Early childhood is a critical process that plays a key role in the shaping of individuals, and therefore, societies. Important duties fall to parents so that this process can be managed successfully. Parents directly or indirectly relay their attitudes toward many topics not only with their childrearing attitudes but also through the interaction…

Research Findings: During COVID-19 many countries, including the U.S., implemented stay-at-home policies that closed most schools and childcare centers. This research focuses on the home learning environment reported by parents for U.S. children ages two through nine during the COVID-19 crisis. Parents in the U.S. (N = 162) completed an online…

Research Findings: Parent involvement is a critical way for children to learn about the importance of education and develop reading skills. Unfortunately, not all low-income parents are able to be involved in their children's education, which can have negative implications for children's reading development. The present study tested if the…

Consistent evidence points to the importance of the early childhood home environment for children's concurrent and subsequent development. Yet little is known about the long-term association between parental warmth in early childhood and children's social-emotional well-being in late childhood for children with and without disabilities. To explore…

Children's early numerical competencies are of great importance for later academic achievement. Young children gain these competencies in the context of the home numeracy environment (HNE). Additionally, child characteristics and families' socioeconomic status (SES) are associated with children's competencies. In this study, we investigated…

Most children experience some form of grouping in the classroom every day. Understanding how teachers make grouping decisions and their impacts on children's social development can shed light on effective teacher practices for promoting positive social dynamics in the classroom. This study examined the influence of teachers' grouping strategies on…

Both early childhood maternal language input and the quality of classroom instruction in elementary school have been shown to be important environmental supports in predicting children's literacy skill development. However, no studies have simultaneously examined these two environmental supports in relation to children's early language skills and…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests (RRBIs). With the latest update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a severity level rating is assigned to the two core features of ASD (American Psychiatric Association in Diagnostic…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the influence of caregivers' reports of family-related environmental confusion--which refers to the level of overstimulation in the family home environment due to auditory and nonauditory (i.e., visual and cognitive) noise--on the relation between child temperament and spoken language outcomes in…

For bilingual children, home literacy experiences contribute to the development of both languages. In this study, survey data were gathered on the frequency of home literacy activities in two languages for forty-two early-elementary students in a French-English dual language immersion program. Using growth modeling, this study focuses on the…

This study investigated the Infant Behavior Record (IBR) as an observer-rated measure of temperament. The aim was to determine whether the IBR and a parent-rated measure of temperament were comparably associated with children's performance on laboratory tasks and with a measure of the home environment. We found several significant associations…

Informed by the biological sensitivity to the context (BSC) theory, this multimethod, longitudinal study sought to examine how family context may be associated with the development of child sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) over a year. Participants were 235 young children (M[subscript age] = 2.97 at the first measurement occasion, 55.3% were…

Past research has examined parental support for children's math and reading skills in the early years through parents' reports of their activities with their children in somewhat inconsistent ways. In this study, we use data from a large sample of parents (n = 259; 103 males) collected through Amazon's Mechanical Turk to examine dimensions of…

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been identified as a key risk factor for a variety of negative health, psychiatric, and behavioral outcomes across the life course. Although recent research has begun to consider the role of ACEs in criminogenic behaviors among youth, few studies to date have assessed the association between early exposure…

The present study examined the relationships between the standardized applied behavior analysis (ABA) direct assessment, the PEAK Comprehensive Assessment (PCA), and established assessments commonly used in educational and clinical settings, including the Childhood Autism Rating Scale - Third Edition (CARS-3), the PDD Behavior Inventory (PDDBI),…