The current study examined the relationships among authoritative parenting, parental scaffolding of long-division math problems, and children's academic competence. In a sample of 70 two-parent middle class families participating in a longitudinal study on the transition to school, authoritative parenting was assessed globally at the beginning of…

A national, multi-site study of behavioral health services integration developed a parent-child interaction assessment tool and culturally anchored videotape protocol. Representatives from programs serving Chinese, Native American, Latin-American, African-American, and Anglo-American families discussed cross-cultural issues in parenting and…

Dialogic reading is an evidence-based intervention to promote the language skills of 2- and 3-year-old children. This study examined conditions under which dialogic reading could be implemented in a community setting. Three methods of instruction were compared: (a) in-person with video instruction in small groups, (b) self-instruction by video…

In attempts to make assessments less threatening, children are sometimes asked to respond to questions about another child rather than about themselves. Little is known about how this manipulation of response format (self versus other) might influence children's responses. This study compared responses of 58 younger (5-7 years) and 68 older (8-11…

This study examined the social-cognitive and behavioral attributes of children who are concurrently aggressive and victimized by their peers. The characteristics of these ''aggressive victims'' were examined in comparison to bullies, passive victims, and normative comparison children. The sample included 240 urban Los Angeles elementary school…

Many injuries occur to school-age children when they are allowed independence in decisions about risk taking during play. The present study examined the influence of child attributes (sensation seeking, typical emotional responses in risk situations) and social-situational context (peer presence) on risk taking. Children in the Experimental Group…

Substantial evidence suggests that young children reason about illnesses using biological causal principles and that, with increasing age, children provide more explicit accounts of mechanisms underlying different conditions. To investigate these claims, sixteen 7-8 year-old children and sixteen 11-12 year-old children with attention…

This study investigated whether shared parent-infant book reading at 4 and 8 months would be associated with subsequent language abilities at 12 and 16 months. Parents of 87 typically developing middle-class infants reported on the presence or absence of shared reading in the home; infant language abilities were measured through laboratory…

This study examined the relationship between early maternal knowledge of child development and later quality of parenting behaviors. Differences by race/ethnic group were also examined. Mother-infant dyads (N=378) participated in the study. Mothers completed the Knowledge of Infant Development Inventory (KIDI) when the infant was 2-4 months, and…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the relationship between school-, neighborhood-, and family-level resources and children's academic achievement, and to identify the role played by father involvement in mediating contextual influences on children's learning. A subsample of 1334 families with children between the ages of 5 and…

Kindergarten, second, fifth, and eighth graders from Germany and the United States participated in structured interviews concerning their beliefs about the nature of intelligence. In both countries, older children were more likely than younger children to link intelligence exclusively to cognitive (rather than noncognitive) abilities, to project…

This report provides baseline information on conditions in orphanages in the Russian Federation. This information addresses three major limitations in the literature on the development of children residing in substandard orphanages and those adopted from such environments. First, although there is an assumption that early exposure to substandard…

This study examined associations between foster mothers' emotional investment, assessed when foster children were age 2, and foster children's representations of self and others, assessed when children were age 5. Caregiver investment was assessed using a semi-structured interview called the ''This is My Baby'' interview (TIMB; Bates, B., &…

To investigate the role of early context in theory of mind development, institutionalized children living in a boarding home (n = 34) in Turkey were compared to home-reared children coming from low (n = 32) and middle socioeconomic backgrounds (n = 44). Theory of mind was assessed with one deception and three false belief tasks; Peabody PVT and…

This study examines children's prosocial behaviors in everyday contexts that represent varying degrees of strength of situational demands. Behavioral observations of children (N = 89) ages 2 to 10 years (M = 5.25, SD = 2.23)., collected in Ngecha, Kenya were coded for 3 types of prosocial behaviors (nurturant, responsible and prosocial dominant)…