Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to early childhood education and care as a foundation for children's successful development in school and beyond. The great majority of children in postindustrial societies now attend preschools or daycare, making this setting a major part of their culturally constructed developmental niches.…

The seven papers in this issue address a variety of challenges that parents in several different cultural places encounter as they do their best to ensure their children's safe, happy, and successful development from infancy through middle childhood: infant sleep, developmental agendas, temperament, preschools, academic success, and learning to be…

This chapter addresses how child-, family-, and school-level characteristics are associated with Chinese children's academic skill development during their preschool years. Academic skills are defined in terms of young children's emergent competencies in academic domains including literacy, mathematics, and science. First, we review the relations…

This chapter identifies three common pitfalls in the use of the concept of empathy in formal social-emotional learning interventions: (1) not distinguishing between affective and cognitive empathy ("equivocation"); (2) overestimating the role of the imagination in empathizing ("Piaget's fallacy"); and (3) not accommodating the developmental and…

Preschoolers' socialization of emotion and its contribution to emotional competence is likely to be highly gendered. In their work, the authors have found that mothers often take on the role of emotional gatekeeper in the family, and fathers act as loving playmates, but that parents' styles of socialization of emotion do not usually differ for…

In this chapter, the authors examine the differences between mothers and fathers in the socialization of specific emotions in preschool-aged boys and girls. They argue that mothers and fathers play both distinct and complementary roles in the development of children's emotional competence; these roles are influenced both by parents' own gender, as…

Children's sensitivity to the shared, conventional nature of word meanings makes their word learning more efficient and less prone to error. After reviewing the evidence in support of this claim, we suggest that children's earliest appreciation of conventionality might be rooted in limitations in their theory-of-mind skills.

Categorization judgments may be right or wrong and more or less useful. When a child calls a whale "a fish," is she making an error, or just describing an interesting similarity? This chapter explores the challenges children face in learning to conform to conventions governing categorization. (Contains 1 figure.)

How, when, and under what conditions do peer interactions contribute to variations in developmental trajectories along dimensions that are important to children's well-being? These compelling and fundamental questions have piqued the interest of developmental scientists and led to studies of the ways in which peers socialize and affect such…

Participation in dinner table conversations offers children opportunities to acquire vocabulary, practice producing and understanding stories and explanations, acquire general knowledge, and learn how to talk in culturally appropriate ways. (Contains 1 table.)

The executive attention network is involved in regulating emotions and cognitions, forming a neural basis for temperamental self-regulation. New brain imaging and molecular genetics methods can enhance our understanding of common mechanisms of self-regulation and individual differences in their expression.