While there is considerable evidence that children's early ability to understand others' mental states, called "theory of mind," is shaped by family experiences, it remains unclear whether children's ...social interactions at school influence theory of mind (ToM) beyond early childhood. We tested whether the mean level ("quantity") and/or the diversity ("variety") of peers' ToM influenced children's own ToM. We also examined whether peer effects on ToM were independent of possible confounding variables (e.g., verbal ability, social isolation) and comparable across children with different initial levels of ToM and social status. Four hundred fifty-four 8-12-year-old children completed assessments of ToM and peer and friendship nominations at baseline and (for ToM only) 1 year later. The variety (but not the quantity) of peers' ToM predicted the development of children's ToM over and above control variables. The magnitude of the peer effect was comparable across different levels of children's ToM and between children indexed as socially isolated and those who were not. These findings fit with sociocultural models and highlight the importance of the school environment in the development of ToM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Widespread concerns about the quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC), and the desire for better child outcomes, have led to a focus on improving teachers’ professional development (PD) ...as a cost-effective means of improving ECEC quality. However, most randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of PD programs have taken place in areas with advanced educational systems. This study aims to fill this research gap by adapting (both educationally and culturally) an evidence-based PD program entitled “Leadership for Learning” in the Chinese context where there is a paucity of effective PD programs. Ninety-five classrooms, 202 teachers, and 547 children (3–5 years old) from 24 kindergartens (12 control, 12 intervention) participated in this RCT program which was designed to improve teachers’ teaching quality and child development. The results of the multilevel modeling indicated that the intervention was positively predictive of classroom quality and child developmental outcomes in literacy and executive function skills. As one of the first studies exploring PD effectiveness in China, this study has several meaningful implications for PD intervention as well as cross-cultural research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
Critical consciousness refers to an individual's awareness of oppressive systemic forces in society, a sense of efficacy to work against oppression, and engagement in individual or collective action ...against oppression. In the past few decades, interest in critical consciousness as a resource that may promote thriving in marginalized people has grown tremendously. This article critically examines the results of a systematic review of 67 studies of critical consciousness in children and adolescents, published between 1998 and 2019. Across these studies, major themes included the role of socialization experiences, relationships, and context in the development of critical consciousness. In addition, critical consciousness was associated with a number of adaptive developmental outcomes, including career-related, civic, social-emotional, and academic outcomes-especially for marginalized youth. However, our analysis highlights several critical gaps in the literature. We highlight the need for further delineation of the impacts of parent and peer socialization on critical consciousness in specific developmental periods and for studying critical consciousness at multiple levels of the ecological system. We further note the dearth of rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental studies in the area of interventions to promote critical consciousness. In addition, we note that developmental questions-questions about the nature and function of critical consciousness over time-are largely unanswered in the literature, including questions about how critical consciousness manifests and develops during childhood. Leveraging the findings of our systematic review, we outline key next steps for this rapidly growing area of research.
Public Significance Statement
Critical consciousness is a person's awareness of oppressive social systems, their sense that they and their communities can work to resist oppression, and their engagement in antioppressive action. This systematic review indicates that critical consciousness may promote thriving among adolescents experiencing marginalization based on their race, social class, income, gender, or other aspects of their identities. Adults such as teachers, parents, and mentors can help to promote critical consciousness in children and youth.
Parent-child coregulation, thought to support children's burgeoning regulatory capacities, is the process by which parents and their children regulate one another through their goal-oriented behavior ...and expressed affect. Two particular coregulation patterns-dyadic contingency and dyadic flexibility-appear beneficial in early childhood, but their role in the typical development of self-regulation is not yet clear. The present study examined whether dynamic parent-child patterns of dyadic contingency and dyadic flexibility in both affect and goal-oriented behavior (e.g., discipline, compliance) predicted multiple components of preschoolers' self-regulation. Mother-child dyads (N = 100) completed structured and unstructured dyadic tasks in the laboratory at age 3, and mothers completed child self-regulation measures at age 4. Findings showed that more flexible and contingent affective parent-child processes, as long as the affective content was primarily positive or neutral, predicted higher levels of self-regulation in early childhood. However, when dyads engaged in more negative affective and behavioral content, higher levels of affective and behavioral contingency and behavioral flexibility predicted lower levels of child self-regulation. Findings suggest parent-child coregulation processes play a meaningful role in children's typical regulatory development and that parent-child coregulation patterns can be potentially adaptive or maladaptive for child outcomes depending on the content of the interaction.
Concepts of national groups (e.g., Americans, Canadians) are an important source of identity and meaning in people's lives. Here, we provide a developmental investigation of these concepts. Across 3 ...studies involving 5- to 8-year-olds and adults in the United States, we found that (a) compared with older children and adults, young children were more likely to think that national groups have a biological basis, but that (b) other aspects of national group concepts-such as the idea that national group membership is stable and informative about a person-changed less with development. Moreover, with age, the notion that membership in a national group is a meaningful fact about a person (vs. a mere formality) began to link up with attitudes that rationalized the national ingroup's economic advantages and portrayed it as superior to national outgroups. This work contributes to theory on the development of social cognition and provides a unique source of insight into current political trends.
We leveraged nationally representative data from the Panel study of Income Dynamics-Child Development Supplement (N = 3,562) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal study (N = 18,174), to chart the ...development of working memory, indexed via verbal forward and backward digit span task performance, from 3 to 19 years of age. Results revealed nonlinear growth patterns for forward and backward digit span tasks, with the most rapid growth occurring during childhood followed by a brief accelerated period of growth during early adolescence. We also found similar developmental trajectories on digit span task performance for males and females across the U.S. population. Together, this study highlights the relative importance of the childhood period for working memory development and provides researchers with a reference against which to compare the developmental changes of working memory in individual studies. From a practical perspective, clinicians and educators can also use this information to understand important periods of working memory growth using national developmental trends.
Early childhood education (ECE) programs have been shown to produce immediate positive impacts on children's cognitive abilities, academic knowledge, and social-emotional skills. However, some ...research suggests that impacts may be modest and short-lived. That is, even though ECE enables participating children to begin kindergarten with greater skills on average compared with their peers, the skills of ECE attendees and nonattendees appear to converge as children progress through school. Thus, any initial differences between these groups observed at school entry are reduced or eliminated over time, a phenomenon that has been described as "fade-out," "catch-up," or both. This systematic review assesses our current understanding of the conditions under which ECE impacts persist or fade over time, which is critical because of the potential intervention and policy implications. Recent work has begun to make progress in this direction, but future efforts that address the present gaps and limitations of the field are needed in order to maximize the long-term impacts of the next generation of ECE programs.
Public Significance Statement
This systematic review examines when and why the impacts of early childhood education programs fade or attenuate over time. Specific mechanisms and moderators of persistent impacts are identified, and directions for future research that can shape practice and policy are discussed.
Children's intelligence mind-sets (i.e., their beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or malleable) robustly influence their motivation and learning. Yet, surprisingly, research has not linked ...parents' intelligence mind-sets to their children's. We tested the hypothesis that a different belief of parents—their failure mind-sets—may be more visible to children and therefore more prominent in shaping their beliefs. In Study 1, we found that parents can view failure as debilitating or enhancing, and that these failure mind-sets predict parenting practices and, in turn, children's intelligence mind-sets. Study 2 probed more deeply into how parents display failure mind-sets. In Study 3a, we found that children can indeed accurately perceive their parents' failure mind-sets but not their parents' intelligence mind-sets. Study 3b showed that children's perceptions of their parents' failure mind-sets also predicted their own intelligence mind-sets. Finally, Study 4 showed a causal effect of parents' failure mind-sets on their responses to their children's hypothetical failure. Overall, parents who see failure as debilitating focus on their children's performance and ability rather than on their children's learning, and their children, in turn, tend to believe that intelligence is fixed rather than malleable.
Reviews the book, The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass by Anna Fishzon and Emma Lieber (2022). This text succeeds in its strategy, set out by the editors in ...their introduction, of querying/queering childhood beyond the well-known tropes of the nonnormative-outsider-homo-disrupter child. An aim of the collection, implicitly and explicitly, is for queerness to work at dismantling normativities from inside as well as outside dominant discourses without becoming entrenched in oppositional and militant methodologies that can ironically end up as a normalizing tendency within the discipline. The collection is thus methodologically aligned with “becoming” in its alertness to the possibilities of queer as a contingent encounter aimed at derailing the apparently seamless work of norms and norming. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
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