Role confusion is a deviation in the parent-child relationship such that a parent looks to a child to meet the parent's emotional needs and abdicates, in part, the parental role in exchange for care, intimacy, or peer support from the child. In addition, a child may initiate role-confused behavior in order to gain closeness to a parent who is…

This article examined longitudinal relations among socioeconomic risk, maternal language input, child vocabulary, and child executive function (EF) in a large sample (N = 1,009) recruited for a prospective longitudinal study. Two measures of maternal language input derived from a parent-child picture book task, vocabulary diversity (VOCD), and…

The authors examined the associations between socioeconomic status (SES), race, maternal sensitivity, and maternal negative-intrusive behaviors and language development in a sample selected to reduce the typical confound between race and SES (n = 146). Mother-child interactions were observed at 12 and 24 months (coded by randomly assigned African…

This research examined the child, parent, and family conditions under which attachment disorganization was related to both level and change in externalizing behavior during preschool among a community sample. Using the ordinary least squares regression, we found that attachment disorganization at 12 months significantly predicted children's…

We examined individual differences and predictions of children's patterns in behavioral, emotional and attentional efforts toward challenging puzzle tasks at 24 and 35 months using data from a large longitudinal rural representative sample. Using latent transition analysis, we found four distinct task-oriented patterns in problem-solving tasks…

Studies have shown that distal family risk factors like poverty and maternal education are strongly related to children's early language development. Yet, few studies have examined these risk factors in combination with more proximal day-to-day experiences of children that might be critical to understanding variation in early language. Young…

In a predominantly low-income population-based longitudinal sample of 1,292 children followed from birth, higher level of salivary cortisol assessed at ages 7, 15, and 24 months was uniquely associated with lower executive function ability and to a lesser extent IQ at age 3 years. Measures of positive and negative aspects of parenting and…