The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program is part of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and provides $1.5 billion over 5 years to states, territories, and tribes with the goal of delivering evidence-based home visiting services as part of a high-quality, comprehensive early childhood system that promotes…

The author explores the reflective components of observation, listening, wondering, and response. Together, these components invite parents to discover who their babies are as well as to understand the importance of nurturing relationships, past and present, to development, growth, and change. Of equal interest, reflective practice offers Infant…

Fostering healthy social and emotional development provides the foundation for school readiness in programs serving infants, toddlers, and their families. In this article, the author explores four key concepts that make the link between social and emotional development and early learning: 1) Cognitive and social-emotional development are…

How does a parent stay connected with an infant or toddler during a prolonged separation? Research has shown how important early connections are for child development. When a parent is not present physically, there are strategies that military parents have been using to keep a parent and child connected, promoting mindfulness. Because infants and…

This article summarizes an evaluation of the Safe Babies Court Teams Project. The study compared children in the Court Teams Project at the four initial sites (n = 298) with a nationally representative sample of young child welfare participants (n = 511) from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW). The Court Teams Project…

When parents make an unintentional mistake that harms their child, the associated guilt and grief can be overwhelming and difficult to treat. The parents described in this article unknowingly created a medical emergency when they added water to their child's formula, thinking it would help her constipation. The baby survived the trauma--but with…

This article illustrates the multidimensional impact of violence during infancy and the effectiveness of a relationship-focused treatment, child-parent psychotherapy (CPP), in addressing the traumatic consequences of exposure to violence. The authors describe the treatment of a 3-year-old boy and his mother and highlight three key points: (a)…

Brenda Jones Harden, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, describes how young children develop the capacity to modulate their emotions and behavior in the first years of life. A child's basic temperament has an impact on self-control, but temper tantrums are a normal part of child…

Ellen Wartella, PhD, a leading scholar of the role of media in children's development, responds to questions about the role of media in the lives of very young children. She discusses how technology is having an impact on parents and children and provides some context for how parents and caregivers can make informed decisions about using media…

Pamela High, MS, MD, co-director of the Infant Behavior, Cry and Sleep Clinic at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, discusses the phenomena of infant crying and the impact it has on families. In most cases, infant crying will peak and resolve in the early months, but infant irritability can increase the risk of maternal…

Jodi Mindell, PhD, the associate director of the Sleep Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, describes how parents and caregivers can help children develop healthy sleeping habits beginning in infancy. Healthy sleep habits are an essential skill for children's overall health and well-being, and they impact family functioning. Dr.…

ZERO TO THREE's parenting survey, Parenting Infants and Toddlers Today (Hart Research Associates, 2010) revealed a number of interesting findings that provided useful insights into how professionals can better support parents and other caregivers. The insights from the survey provided an opportunity for ZERO TO THREE to develop new resources to…

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, discusses how early childhood experiences in one's own family have an influence on adult parenting practices. Attachment research has studied the way parents interact with their children, across all different cultures and…

This article tells the story of the 4-year consensus-building process to design quality standards for the field of family child care. Working with the National Association for Family Child Care, the Family Child Care Project at Wheelock College was funded to create an accreditation system for home-based child care programs using innovative methods…

Parents are often the first to recognize early signs of developmental challenges, launching the family into an unanticipated journey that sometimes resolves quickly but sometimes not. Development depends on nurturing relationships that provide the necessary experiences to allow the child to develop. Equally important are the relationships that…