In this essay, we comment on the dominant practice in high-resource societies of placing children without biological parental care (CwoBPC) into substitution families, and the promotion of this solution as evidence-based and state of the art. As the Russian Federation has formulated and is now addressing in matching legislation, it possibly…

Although research has increasingly emphasized how adolescent sexual behavior may be associated with aspects of health beyond unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, no current theoretical or conceptual model fully explains associations between sexual behavior and multiple facets of health. We provide a conceptual model that…

Research on immigrant communities has often been reductionist, stereotypical, and simplistic, and even the most well-intentioned researchers are susceptible to using cultural deficit models. This chapter critically evaluates some of the dominant tensions and problem areas with respect to researching immigrant communities. Specifically, we analyze…

This chapter reviews the research on environmental exemplars, or activists. General themes that have been identified in the literature include early experiences in nature, the influence of other people and organizations, opportunities for environmental education, environmental self and identity formation, and generativity. With these themes in…

According to educational gaming advocates, the engaging nature of games encourages sustained game play and enhanced attention to learning outcomes among players. Because children's and adolescents' play time varies by game genre, engagement with a game likely reflects the match between the genre and the player's preferences and needs. Youth learn…

Adolescents may seek to understand family conflict by seeking out confidants. However, little is known about whom adolescents seek, whether and how such support helps youth, and the factors that predict which sources are sought. This chapter offers a conceptual model of guided cognitive reframing that emphasizes the behavioral, cognitive, and…

Research has shown that a hallmark of adolescent development is the growing capacity to interpret human intentionality. In this chapter, the authors examine developmental change in this capacity, which they have termed interpretive thought, in two types of stories, family and autobiographical, told by Canadian youth aged ten to seventeen years.…

Self-regulation represents a core aspect of human functioning that influences positive development across the life span. This chapter focuses on the action-control model, a key facet of self-regulation during childhood and early adolescence. The authors discuss the development of action-control beliefs, paying particular attention to their…

The positive youth development (PYD) perspective emphasizes that thriving occurs when individual [double arrow] context relations involve the alignment of adolescent strengths with the resources in their contexts. The authors propose that a key component of this relational process is the strength that youth possess in the form of self-regulatory…

In this chapter, the authors extend the ideas around the development of self-regulation and its impact on development by proposing a life-span, relational, public health model. They propose that the role of self-regulation should be understood across transitions from childhood to adulthood and through an individual and community perspective,…

Stressful life events and experiences may disrupt the typical day-to-day interactions between sisters and brothers that provide the foundation of sibling socialization. This chapter examines four experiences that may affect patterns of sibling interaction: parental marital conflict, parental divorce and remarriage, foster care placement, and a…

We summarize progress in the developmental study of coping, including specification of a multilevel framework, construction of definitions of coping that rely on regulation as a core concept, and identification of developmentally graded members of families of coping. We argue that these accomplishments are a prelude to the real tasks of a…

This chapter describes longitudinal findings from a socially diverse sample of 125 British children seen at ages two and four. Four models of social influence on executive function are tested, using multiple measures of family life as well as comprehensive assessments of children's executive functions. Our results confirm the importance of…

Little research has examined how low-income Asian American children are supported to achieve well in school. The authors used the notion of social capital to study higher versus lower achieving Chinese adolescents from low-income backgrounds. They found that families of higher-achieving adolescents built and used more effectively three kinds of…

Conventionality and contrast provide the pragmatic basis of language use for adults. These principles play a vital role in the process of acquiring a first language as children learn how to interact using language.