This study, using longitudinal data from the South African Birth to Twenty Plus study, assessed associations between early childcare quality in the home between six months and two years, household SES and cognitive development at age 5. Childcare quality was assessed using measures of maternal responsiveness and cognitive stimulation. Cognitive…

Feeding problems are common in autistic children. They include eating a limited repertoire of foods and often impact on health and quality of life. To examine the experiences of parents of autistic children who have feeding problems, and their service needs. A pragmatic, qualitative research approach was adopted. Six participants were recruited…

Infants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted an ecologically grounded test of an embodied learning hypothesis: that infants' active engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home-based study extends laboratory-based theories to identify real-world processes…

This dissertation addressed the topic of early childhood literacy development in the home environment. The dissertation will focus on studying the early childhood literacy experiences a small population (7 to 10 participants) of single mothers living in the municipality of Utuado, Puerto Rico had during this stage of their lives. The single mother…

Research Findings: Immigrant families who represent a growing share of the early schooling population face unique challenges related to involvement in their children's education. This study examined whether and to what extent home-based parent involvement and parental warmth are associated with the socio-emotional and academic outcomes of children…

Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…

Background: Raising a child with developmental disorder is often related to higher stress levels for both mothers and fathers. The aim of the present study was to investigate relationships between resilience, family hardiness, life satisfaction and parental stress among parents of children with and without disabilities. Method: Twenty-eight pairs…

During the past decade, the field of family language policy has broadened its scope and turned its attention to diverse family configurations in versatile sociolinguistic contexts. The current study contributes to this endeavor by focusing on two single-parent families who live in Finland and who strive to support Russian as a family language.…

Despite the well-documented phenomenon that Chinese parents tend to be actively involved in their young children's education, few studies have explored how Chinese parents manifest math involvement and how their practices operate in early math learning at home. This study investigated Chinese mothers' teaching behavior and its relation to child…

Purpose: Fathers play a critical but underresearched role in their children's cognitive and linguistic development. Focusing on two-parent families with a mother and a father, the present longitudinal study explores the amount of paternal input infants hear during the first 2 years of life, how this input changes over time, and how it relates to…

We investigated the continuity and stability of imitative episodes (IMEs) to shed light on the nature of early infant imitative ability. We observed and analyzed interactions of 27 mother-infant pairs as they played in their homes at one and 10 months. We coded the initiator, frequency, duration, kind, structure, and affect of IMEs. At 10 months,…

This paper reports a follow up analysis of longitudinal date. We (1) examined urban Chinese mothers' occupations as a function of their educational levels, (2) tested mediating effects of home environment variables after fine-tuning key variables of maternal education and home environment by excluding data that were provided by the children's…

Working from home as a preventive measure against the spread of COVID-19 has extensively impacted the mental health of academics worldwide. Interviewing 73 Indonesian academics who are also mothers, the current article investigates key impacts of mental distress among them during enforced remote working in the country, and how they encountered…

This study examined the links between classroom skill compositions and preschoolers' early learning and development in the nationally representative Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey 2014 (FACES, n = 1,711 children/207 classrooms) and public pre-K programs in a county in Virginia (n = 1,467 children/123 classrooms). Results from a…

Literacy exposure checklists that assess parental picture book knowledge (Parental Title Checklist [PTC] and Parental Author Checklist [PAC]) have been developed as proxy measures for literacy environments. Although previous research suggests that parental picture book knowledge is a strong predictor of language skills for preschoolers older than…