The study investigated the relationship between family stress and child characteristics in families with motor impaired toddlers. Families of 20 children between 2 1/2 and 5 years old with motor impairments, who visit a therapeutic toddler class in a rehabilitation centre, participated. The study was carried out in the Netherlands. Family stress…

According to this author, the field of teaching young children is at a pivotal point in its history. On the one hand, there is an unprecedented attention from policy-makers and funders all keen to reap the proven economic, social and academic outcomes of early childhood for their communities. However, unlike the K-12 system, the provision of early…

The introduction to this article will seek to present a distillation of Sally Lubeck's achievements in order to provide a benchmark of existing knowledge in the field of early childhood care and education from her perspective and an indication of its likely future. Her work, it is suggested, provides an exemplification of the new sociology of…

The focus of this article is on the themes of gender, work, and child care as they have been addressed in much of Sally Lubeck's work, in an attempt to understand her trajectory, and her diverse messages to us. In reading her work for this article, key themes stood out that focus our attention on Sally Lubeck's continuing fight for better public…

Conducting research is an ever evolving process of deepening one's understanding of multiple research concepts and issues. In the research on Head Start that this author and her colleagues conducted under the tutelage of Dr Sally Lubeck, their research team increased their knowledge and experience of research while developing a contextualized…

The article considers three domains of Sally Lubeck's scholarship as illustrations of her orientation to research on early care and education: her critique of positivism in general and the field of developmental psychology (and the sub-discipline of child development) specifically as the primary source of a "knowledge base" for the field of early…

This article reviews Sally Lubeck's international contributions. It describes her role as "rapporteur" for the OECD review of early education and care services in the UK, one of 20 such reviews commissioned by the OECD. It discusses the continued relevance of her observations and comments on provision in the UK. The article goes on to comment…

Previous research has suggested that by the age of six, children display high levels of competence in identifying and reliably distinguishing between different musical styles. Until now, it has been difficult to investigate musical style sensitivity in the early years because the test procedures have relied heavily on the use of language,…

Whilst regulation is utilized by governments in Australia and internationally as a means of promoting quality standards in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services, a growing body of literature is critical of the detrimental effect of this regulation. Drawing on our investigation into early childhood teachers' perceptions of the impact…

The study investigated ten early childhood teachers' perceptions of their relationships with 120 children (mean age = 4 years 3 months), of whom 41 children spoke English as an additional language (EAL: mean age = 4 years 2 months). The Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) was employed to elicit teachers' perceptions of their relationships in…

Early childhood teachers in Victoria, Australia face increasing cultural and "racial" diversity among the children and families with whom they work. A small-scale exploratory study found that many teachers were uncertain about how best to respond to such diversity and a mismatch between social expectations that teachers would encourage children to…

Research on career development has focused primarily on adolescents and adults. However, in Gottfredson's theory of circumscription and compromise (2002) it is proposed that career aspirations originate in the preschool years and that the earliest work aspirations of children are sex typed in relation to the activities of same sex adults. This…

Much of the current rhetoric in areas of child and family research and in early childhood education emphasizes the importance of listening to children in research that has a direct impact on them. Despite this, there remain qualms in some research contexts and amongst some researchers about the reliability, validity and generalizability of…

This study examines the differences in self-reported fathering activities of men who were reported to be a residential biological father or father figure. Specifically, this study examines self-reported fathering activities which include physical play activities, social skills activities, cognitive activities, and caregiving activities across…

Communities in the UK are seeing a sustained shift in the balance of care of babies and the youngest children from families to nurseries, with a particular emphasis being placed on early learning. Yet a basic question of whether nurseries should be modelled on the intimacy and spontaneity of family interactions or the more professional and planned…