Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

Joint attention (JA) is an early manifestation of social cognition, commonly described as interactions in which an infant looks or gestures to an adult female to share attention about an object, within a positive emotional atmosphere. We label this description the JA phenotype. We argue that characterizing JA in this way reflects unexamined assumptions which are, in part, due to past developmental researchers' primary focus on western, middle-class infants and families. We describe a range of cultural variations in caregiving practices, socialization goals, and parenting ethnotheories as an essential initial step in viewing joint attention within inclusive and contextualized perspectives...

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An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality...

Developmental theorists have made strong claims about the fundamental prosocial or aggressive nature of the human infant. However, only rarely have prosocial behavior and aggression been studied together in the same sample. We charted the parallel development of both behaviors from infancy to childhood in a British community sample, using a two-construct, multimethod longitudinal design. Data were drawn from the Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS), a prospective longitudinal study of a volunteer sample of parents and their firstborn children...

Research demonstrates that children's participation in quality early childhood care and education often has immediate positive effects on their social-emotional, self-regulation, and achievement outcomes. Most of the research on the impacts of early child care and education has focused narrowly on the United States, but advocacy for economic and social investment in early childhood care and education to support future children's growth and well-being now exists on an international scale. The longer-term outcomes from prekindergarten programs have not been as strong...

Growing up in the aftermath of armed conflict puts youth at a higher risk for psychopathology-particularly in societies like Northern Ireland which continue to be characterized by intergroup tension and cyclical violence. This risk may be heightened during adolescence, when youth are beginning to explore their identities and are becoming more aware of intergroup dynamics in both their immediate communities and the broader society. It is also during this stage when youth increasingly witness or engage in antisocial behavior and sectarian activities...

Respect is an integral part of everyday life. It is a virtue central to the aim of living an ethically good life. Despite its importance, little is known about its emergence, development, correlates, and consequences. In this monograph, we aim to fill this gap by presenting empirical work on children's and adolescents' thinking and feelings about respect. Specifically, we examined the development of respect in ethnically diverse samples of children between the ages of 5 and 15 years (N = 476). Using a narrative and semi-structured interview, as well as self-, caregiver- and teacher-reports, and peer-nominations, we collected information on children's respect conceptions and reasoning, as well as on the social-emotional correlates and prosocial and aggressive behavioral outcomes of respect...

Through civic engagement, adolescents can increase community vitality, challenge injustices, and address social problems. Positive youth development (PYD) theory and research has generated knowledge of ecological assets (resources and supports in everyday environments) that foster youth civic engagement. Yet, assets and opportunities are not equally available to all youth. Youth of color in urban high-poverty neighborhoods merit more concerted attention in research on civic development to inform theory, policy, and practice...

Young children develop causal knowledge through everyday family conversations and activities. Children's museums are an informative setting for studying the social context of causal learning because family members engage together in everyday scientific thinking as they play in museums. In this multisite collaborative project, we investigate children's developing causal thinking in the context of family interaction at museum exhibits. We focus on explaining and exploring as two fundamental collaborative processes in parent-child interaction, investigating how families explain and explore in open-ended collaboration at gear exhibits in three children's museums in Providence, RI, San Jose, CA, and Austin, TX...

We explore a long-observed phenomenon in children's cognitive development known as size seriation. It is not until children are around 7 years of age that they spontaneously use a strict ascending or descending order of magnitude to organize sets of objects differing in size. Incomplete and inaccurate ordering shown by younger children has been thought to be related to their incomplete grasp of the mathematical concept of a unit. Piaget first brought attention to children's difficulties in solving ordering and size-matching tests, but his tasks and explanations have been progressively neglected due to major theoretical shifts in scholarship on developmental cognition...

In this monograph, we argue for the establishment of a developmental science of politics that describes, explains, and predicts the formation and change of individuals' political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior beginning in childhood and continuing across the life course. Reflecting our goal of contributing both theoretical conceptualizations and empirical data, we have organized the monograph into two broad sections. In the first section, we outline theoretical contributions that the study of politics may make to developmental science and provide practical reasons that empirical research in the domain of politics is important (e...

As one of the hallmarks of human activity and cultural achievement, bimanual coordination has been the focus of research efforts in multiple fields of inquiry. Since the seminal work of Cohen (1971) and Kelso and colleagues (Haken, Kelso, & Bunz, 1985; Kelso, Southard, & Goodman, 1979), bimanual action has served as a model system used to investigate the role of cortical, perceptual, cognitive, and situational underpinnings of coordinated movement sequences (e.g., Bingham, 2004; Oliveira & Ivry, 2008)...

We examined the association between U.S.-born mothers' and fathers' intrusiveness at 24 months and children's sociability and sustained attention at prekindergarten in a sample of low-income, ethnic minority children (N = 74) enrolled in Early Head Start in the U.S. Event-based coding captured the frequency and intensity of parents' intrusive episodes with their children as well as the contingent affect of parents and children during each episode. Fathers and mothers did not differ in frequency of intrusive episodes; fathers were more intensely intrusive but exhibited more positive affect during intrusive episodes than mothers...

To understand new fathers' experiences and well-being, we examine links between fathers and their partners' replenishing and stressful daily experiences-exercise, sleep, work, chores, general stress, and parenting stress-and their own and their partners' well-being and family relations. Fathers and mothers of ten-month old infants (N=143/140 mothers/fathers) in the U.S. reported on daily experiences for eight consecutive days. Results of multilevel models indicated that more replenishing and fewer stressful daily experiences were generally linked to more parent happiness, better couple relations, and greater closeness with the infant...

The current study explored whether fathers and mothers from 195 two-parent U.S. families engaged in a form of activation parenting (i.e., sensitivity, cognitive stimulation, and moderate intrusiveness) with their secondborn, 12-month-old infants during a 15-min challenging teaching task, and to determine if this type of interaction was more common among fathers. Mean comparisons showed that fathers were lower on sensitivity, positive regard, and stimulation of development, and were more detached than mothers...

Fathers are more than social accidents. Research has demonstrated that fathers matter to children's development. Despite noted progress, challenges remain on how best to conceptualize and assess fathering and father-child relationships. The current monograph is the result of an SRCD-sponsored meeting of fatherhood scholars brought together to discuss these challenges and make recommendations for best practices for incorporating fathers in studies on parenting and children's development. The first aim of this monograph was to provide a brief update on the current state of research on fathering and to lay out a developmental ecological systems perspective as a conceptual framework for understanding the different spaces fathers inhabit in their children's lives...

This commentary applauds the authors of the monograph, The Mother-Child Attachment Partnership in Early Childhood: Secure Base Behavioral and Representational Processes, for their thorough and elegant exploration of the development of attachment working models in the preschool years in relation to maternal sensitivity and attachment representations, mother-child co-constructions of attachment-relevant stories, and children's own secure base behavior. These findings are set against a backdrop of children's memory development, with the recommendation that future research delves even younger to explore the development of attachment working models in children under 3 years...

Attachment relationships are formed, organized, and elaborated through interactions between an attachment figure and her/his child. The parent-child codetermination process that establishes their relationship in infancy extends and expands during the preschool years. A child's developing ability to use her/his mother as a secure base requires support, time, and practice during early childhood. Moreover, experiences with attachment figures provide information that children use to build internal representations of their relationship...

Using the secure base construct, the evidence presented indicates that interactional experience continues to be a central factor in the organization of mother-child attachment relationships. The parent-child codetermination process that establishes their relationship in infancy expands during the preschool years. Furthermore, with the increasingly relevant role of language, parent-child verbal communication during this time plays an important part in structuring children's attachment behavior and knowledge...

This study focused on the role of maternal co-construction skills in building attachment relevant representations in early childhood. Thirty-four mothers and their 4- to 5-year-old children were presented with two co-construction tasks, one an attachment storytelling task, the other an affect discussion task about emotion-laden situations. Maternal co-construction skills were assessed with several scales that scored the quality of the co-construction partnership, the mother's skill in prompting elaboration, and helping build an explanatory framework...