Child Development

This study investigated the association between early bilingualism and children's mental health trajectories from early to middle childhood in the United Kingdom. Data were drawn from the Millennium Cohort Study, with parents of 15,435 children (2,146 bilinguals; 49% female) completing the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire when their children were aged 3, 5, 7, and 11 years. The sample, re…

Several reports have described increases in children's behavior problems since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but few were based on prospective data or represented groups who disproportionately experienced pandemic-related hardships. This study followed low-income and racially diverse young children from 3 U.S. cities-New York, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, and Tulsa, OK-with repeated measures of chil…

Human numerical cognition relies on two core systems: the Approximate Number System (ANS), supporting approximate magnitude estimation, and the Object Tracking System (OTS), enabling precise individuation of up to 3 or 4 items. This study tested 32 healthy, full-term newborns (0-3 days old; 18 females) recruited from a maternity ward serving a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse population. …

This preregistered study examined early transitions in children's spontaneous memory recall tendencies. Children aged 3 to 5 years (N = 72; 36 females; mostly White) were presented with a simple visuospatial memory task in which they freely recalled the locations of sequentially hidden targets across four test phases. We observed distinct age-related shifts in output order: younger children predo…

The current study examined associations between the quality of children's social interactions with their teachers and peers and their concurrent parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity in the early education classroom. Data were collected from 80 children (Mage = 4.91 years, 50% female, 50% White). The quality of children's social interaction with their teachers and peers was assessed acros…

The current study took a developmental and familial perspective to understand the impact of bicultural management difficulties on internalizing symptoms within mother-adolescent dyads. Multilevel analyses were conducted based on a three-wave data set from 604 adolescents (54% female; Mage = 12.92) and their mothers (n = 596; Mage = 38.89) in Mexican immigrant families collected from 2012 to 2020.…

This study is the first to investigate the causal relation between universal childcare for three- to under-six-year-olds and long-term educational attainment in Germany using an instrumental variable approach. A reform, which legally entitled three-year-olds to childcare in 1996, caused an exogenous expansion of childcare supply, which serves as instrument. Using the German National Educational P…

This research investigated 4- to 8-year-old children's learning preferences based on teachers' responses to peers' pragmatic (Study 1, 2021-2024, N = 100, Mage = 6.56 years, SDage = 1.41, 50 females, 61% White) and naturalistic (Study 2, 2024, N = 101, Mage = 6.24 years, SDage = 1.50, 57 females, 55% White) questions. Children evaluated teachers providing (i) explanations with semantic content vs…

The effectiveness of social learning depends on whether learners receive help when they need it. In four preregistered studies, U.S. 4-6-year-olds (N = 244; 54% female, 48% Asian, 2% Black, 9% Hispanic/Latino, 24% Multiracial/Other, 27% White) interacted with an adult who either did or did not follow through on promised help. Experiment 1 tested the effect of reliable vs. unreliable help on child…

Digit comparison and order processing performance predict children's later arithmetic skills in the elementary years, presumably because they assess foundational symbolic number knowledge (i.e., cardinal and ordinal associations). However, the influence of earlier arithmetic on later magnitude and order processing has rarely been assessed. Numeracy skills were assessed in two longitudinal cohorts…

Children from low socioeconomic (SES) households have a higher-than-average rate of exhibiting late talking (LT). Population-based studies have identified risk and protective factors for LT, yet low-SES families are underrepresented. This study examined LT and household characteristics among low-SES families. Mothers (n = 199; 42% Black, 42% White, 17% Other; Mean age = 31.62) completed sociodemo…

Between September 26, 2022 and August 30, 2023, 5- to 12-year-old children and their parents (N = 258, 178 females, 1 nonbinary) from the U.S.A., judged conflicting scientific and religious claims with respect to death. Most secular participants endorsed the scientific claims and rejected the religious claims regardless of age, whereas most religious participants endorsed the religious claims and…

This study examined the extent to which young children's affect expressions during interactions with new peers are attributable to individual traits versus unique relationships, and how behavioral inhibition (BI) relates to these expressions. Using a longitudinal dyadic design collected between 2003 and 2008, 291 children (Mage = 24 months at baseline, 60% female, 69.7% White) were observed playi…

This study examined associations between teacher-child relationships in early childhood education and care (ECEC) and in Grade 2 with bullying and emotional and behavioral problems in Grade 2, using data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa; N = 7,478, 50.2% boys). Data were collected between 2011 and 2017, and race and ethnicity data were not collected. In ECEC, conflic…

This longitudinal study examined mental health trajectories in a Chilean child cohort (N = 468, 48.9% girls; 19.2% children of migrant mothers) from ages three to six, spanning the pre-, during-, and post-COVID-19 periods. Group-based multitrajectory modeling identified five profiles: three lower-symptom (82.9%) and two higher-risk groups (17.1%), characterized by persistent or escalating co-occu…

Malnutrition is a critical global health challenge, contributing to nearly half of child deaths under 5 and impairing physical and mental health, along with neural and cognitive development. Prior research has linked growth faltering to altered EEG functional connectivity (FC) and poorer cognitive outcomes, though findings varied across ages. This study (2022-2024) examined associations between n…

Many developmentalists are interested in causal questions, including those concerned with the dosage and timing of exposures experienced repeatedly over time. However, causal inferences are challenging with observational data, and common statistical tools (e.g., regression adjustment) break down in the context of time-varying confounding. This paper introduces one powerful causal inference tool f…

This study draws on repeated-measures data on a diverse (51% female; 54% Latine, 20% Black, and 11% White), low--income cohort of children (N = 618) whose academic skills were assessed before and after COVID-19-induced school closures. Longitudinal models predicted changes in children's literacy and math trajectories from before school closures (ages 4-6; 2017-2019) to after school reopening (age…

While the COVID-19 pandemic had well-documented short-term consequences for children's learning, less is known about longer-term academic trajectories. Using a longitudinal sample of Ghanaian children (2015-2024; N = 2,901; Mages = 5.1-13.2 years; 49.3% female), this study employed a piecewise latent growth curve approach to examine math trajectories before, during, and after the pandemic and exa…

This study examined adolescents' reasoning about intergroup social class friendships and marriage in rural Nepal. Participants (N = 591; 54% girls; Mage = 14.03; 20% Nepalese ethnic/caste minority; data collected in 2018) evaluated the potential for friendship and marriage between hypothetical pairs from different social class backgrounds. Adolescents demonstrated a strong awareness of social bar…