Today, many children worldwide grow up in bilingual or multilingual families. This study explores early literacy development in Russian-Hebrew bilingual families in Israel. It studies the contribution of the home literacy environment (HLE), the language of communication, and the nature of the maternal writing support in Hebrew and Russian, to…

Most studies of how parents of children with autism view the parent-child relationship used self-report questionnaires and focused on challenges. This study broadened the lens by interviewing parents using open-ended questions that provide an opportunity to raise challenging but also positive experiences. Seventy-five mother-father dyads were…

Over the past few decades, there has been a shift from the traditional family structure, with more acceptance of different structures, including those led by single parents. This qualitative photo-narrative study aimed at making the voices of single mothers raising children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) heard. According to the literature,…

This longitudinal multiple-case study research focused on the scaffolding strategies that two Israeli deaf mothers use to boost their young hearing children's engagement in reading interactions. Despite being significant to language learning, few studies have examined the dialogic reading practices of deaf-signing mothers. The study shows that…

Based on interviews with low-income, Israeli mothers about their experience supporting children's remote-learning during COVID, this study offers theoretical insights about the accomplishment of natural-growth. The accomplishment of natural-growth is a theoretical concept coined by Lareau to describe the logics of low-income childrearing. Though…

Professional literature has indicated the detrimental effect of postpartum depression (PPD) and impaired mother's bond with baby (MBB) on infants throughout their development. The present study aimed to examine whether the associations between caregiving dispositions and both postpartum depression (PPD) and mothers' perception of their bond with…

Parental mobile device use while parenting has been associated with reduced parental responsiveness and increased negative affect among children. However, it remains unclear whether it can interfere with the process of acquiring social communication skills. Thus, this study sought to experimentally examine whether maternal mobile phone use while…

The present study examined both mothers' reports and adolescents' perceptions of parents' educational involvement and their effects on the adolescents' functioning in school. The sample was drawn from 5 urban schools in Israel. Participants were 449 eighth grade students/adolescents (Female = 47%) and 126 mothers. Adolescents and their mothers…

Emotional availability in parent-child interactions fosters children's socioemotional development. Little is known about the emotional availability of parents and children with profound motor disabilities and complex communication needs or the contributions of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to emotional availability. To begin…

This study examined the effects of maternal and children's resources on school readiness, literacy achievements, and reading motivation in children. The participants included children (N = 180) (124 girls; 56 boys) from 19 kindergartens, their mothers, and their kindergarten teachers. Mothers reported on their working hours, interaction quality,…

This study examined parental playfulness as a mediator of the association between mothers' emotional difficulties (anxiety, depression) and their children's psychosocial adjustment (externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behaviours). We also examined the associations between parental playfulness and mothers' supportive / unsupportive…

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has deleterious effects on children. Our research observed mothers' conversations with their 5-7-year-old children about the conflict during shared book reading (SBR) of a fiction book, indirectly depicting the conflict. Using a mixed-methods study, we compared the SBR of secular and religious Israeli Jewish…

Infants and toddlers spend a substantial amount of their time in out-of-home care, and are thus being tended to not only by their mothers but also by their caregivers. It is therefore of considerable importance to study the effects of caregiver-infant compared to mother-infant interactions. To address this issue, first, various variables of…

Unraveling factors that influence parenting is of great importance, since parents play an important role in their children's development. In this study we focused on parental prenatal expectations, parents' gender and child's distress to limitations as possible influences on parental behavior and observed the longitudinal associations between…

Objective: This study aimed to examine the effects of maternal demographics, interaction quality, and children's gender on school readiness using different informants. Method: Participants recruited for this study included 25 kindergarten teachers, 271 mothers, and their kindergarten children (169 girls and 102 boys with a mean age of 4.28 years).…