The transition to kindergarten is a critical developmental marker for young children. While the early childhood literature includes several established best practices to ensure a smooth and positive transition for both children and their families, less is known about transitional experiences of Mexican immigrants. Using a qualitative approach,…

Parents' beliefs, values and associated everyday practices can play an influential role in their children's educational environment. This paper reports on a subsection of data from a larger qualitative study on how immigrant parents' cultural beliefs, values and everyday practices contributed to shaping their young children's early engagement in…

This paper highlights the complex relations between public and private spaces with regard to young children's bilingual learning, and the importance of developing a pedagogy that allows for the interaction of learning across the two spaces. It uses findings from a qualitative study to illustrate nuanced (mis)alignments between dominant language…

The immigrant population in Hong Kong is steadily increasing every year. This immigrant population largely comprises families, most of whom have pre-school and school-age children. However, limited information is known on the practices that immigrant parents adopt when they become involved in their children's schooling. In the present study, the…

"Children Crossing Borders" was an ambitious study of the intersection of im/migration and early childhood education in five countries: England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. This article looks back at this study a decade later, presenting the main findings and proposing suggestions about how in the contemporary climate…

Diverse immigrants have significantly transformed the ethnic make-up of New Zealand, and they have brought with them diverse identities to this country. Findings from a doctoral research project which involved exploring Chinese immigrant parents' identity choices for themselves and their children highlight the complex politics of identity. Within…

The expressive lexical skills of 53 Polish bilinguals aged 24-36 months living in the UK and Ireland were assessed using Polish and British English adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Polish vocabulary scores were compared to those of 53 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and parental education. The…

This comparative study investigated the experiences of starting childcare of three immigrant children in three different learning environments in New Zealand. The notion of learning environment was explored as a way of thinking about how different people, places, and approaches to learning have interacted to create a particular site for the…

A popular social discourse in the United States is that play is important for children's learning and that parental involvement maximizes play's learning potential. Past research has concluded that parents who hold this view of play are more likely to play with their children than those who do not. This study investigated the prevalence…

Research Findings: In this study we analyze how parent and teacher ratings of young Latino children's social competencies in rural California are associated with children's oral language development. We find (a) that there is considerable incongruence between parent and teacher ratings of child social competence, (b) that both parent and teacher…

Culture serves as a guiding framework to parents while rearing their children. However, when parents immigrate from one culture to another, they have to negotiate the conflicting demands and values of the two cultures when making decisions about child rearing. The present study investigated various aspects of parenting demonstrated by…

This study examines the similarity of socialization goals of a group of mothers with different cultural backgrounds and their children's respective preschool teachers in Germany. Additionally, the researchers were interested in the relationship between the degree of mother-teacher similarity and maternal satisfaction with child care. Questionnaire…

This study explores Korean-immigrant parents' language ideologies and practices with respect to their American-born children's language development. Participants were seven ethnic Korean families composed of immigrant parents and their American-born children, aged between five and seven, in Midwestern America. Interviews in the medium of Korean…

We examined parental preferences in raising Spanish/English bilingual children. We identified factors influencing their decisions, and the strategies used to promote bilingualism. Focus groups were conducted with Spanish-primary-language parents of children 3 to 7 years old. These groups were audiotaped and transcribed. Three reviewers…

Research Findings: Children from immigrant families are more likely than children of native parents to start school with fewer of the academic skills that are important for long-term success, although evidence on behavioral skills is mixed. Center-based early education and care (EEC) programs, which have been linked to improvements in academic…