This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with…

Questioning is a core component of formal pedagogy. Parents commonly question children, but do they use questions to teach? This article defines "pedagogical questions" as questions for which the questioner already knows the answer and intended to help the questionee learn. Transcripts of parent-child conversations were collected from…

Effects of child and environmental factors in moderating the course of bilingual development were investigated using longitudinal data, from age 2.5 to 5 years, on 126 U.S.-born children with early exposure to Spanish and English. Multilevel models of Spanish and English expressive vocabulary identified children's phonological memory ability as a…

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of…

This study used Latent Class Analysis to identify groups of children exposed to similar Home Language and Literacy Environments (HLLE) and explored whether belonging to a given HLLE group was related to children's language and early literacy growth from prekindergarten to kindergarten. Participants were 1,425 Chilean mothers and their children…

Everyday activities are replete with contextual cues for infants to exploit in the service of learning words. Nelson's (1985) script theory guided the hypothesis that infants participate in a set of predictable activities over the course of a day that provide them with opportunities to hear unique language functions and forms. Mothers and their…

One-quarter of the Head Start population has a mother who participated in the program as a child. This study uses experimental Head Start Impact Study (HSIS) data on 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 2,849) to describe multigenerational Head Start families and their program experiences. In sharp contrast to full-sample HSIS findings, Head Start has large,…

This study examined parenting knowledge among Mexican-origin adolescent mothers (N = 191; M[subscript age] = 16.26 years), family contextual factors associated with adolescents' parenting knowledge, and toddlers' (M[subscript age] = 2.01 years) subsequent developmental outcomes. Data came from home interviews and direct child…

Guided by family risk and allostasis theoretical frameworks, the present study utilized a prospective longitudinal design to examine associations among family risk experiences, basal cortisol patterns, and cognitive functioning in children. The sample included 201 low-income children living within a midsize city in the Northeastern United States.…

Theory and policy highlight the role of child care in preparing children for the transition into school. Approaching this issue in a different way, this study investigated whether children's care experiences before this transition promoted their mothers' school involvement after it, with the hypothesized mechanism for this link being the…

Findings are presented on a U.K. study of 41 gay father families, 40 lesbian mother families, and 49 heterosexual parent families with an adopted child aged 3-9 years. Standardized interview and observational and questionnaire measures of parental well-being, quality of parent-child relationships, child adjustment, and child sex-typed behavior…

Fifteen-year-old adolescents (N = 109) in a longitudinal study of child development were recruited to examine differences in DNA methylation in relation to parent reports of adversity during the adolescents' infancy and preschool periods. Microarray technology applied to 28,000 cytosine-guanine dinucleotide sites within DNA derived from buccal…

The development and adjustment correlates of parent-child social (parent, child, and others present) and dyadic time (only parent and child present) from age 8 to 18 were examined. Mothers, fathers, and firstborns and secondborns from 188 White families participated in both home and nightly phone interviews. Social time declined across…

Previous work has shown that mothers' employment is associated with increases in children's body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight for height. Nonstandard work (working evenings or nights, weekends, or an irregular shift) may also be associated with children's BMI. This article examines the association between maternal work and children's BMI…

Children's home learning environments were examined in a low-income sample of 1,852 children and families when children were 15, 25, 37, and 63 months. During home visits, children's participation in literacy activities, the quality of mothers' engagements with their children, and the availability of learning materials were assessed, yielding a…