Child Development

The history and purpose of the Nellis Air Force Base Child Care Center is to provide a safe learning environment for developing children of military families.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/educ_sys_202/1039/thumbnail.jp

Mother-to-infant and father-to-infant initial emotional involvement

While infant attachment has been largely studied, parental attachment is still relatively unknown, especially when referred to fathers. However, it is mainly recognised that parents’ emotional involvement with the newborn contributes to the quality of the interaction and the care they provide. The aim of this study was to study mother-to-infant and father-to-infant initial emotional involvement; namely, differences between mothers and fathers and changes in mother’s emotions toward the neonate within the first days after delivery. The Bonding Scale, an extended Portuguese version of the ‘New Mother-to-Infant Bonding Scale’, was administered during the first two days after childbirth to a sample of 315 mothers and 141 fathers (n = 456), at the Júlio Dinis Maternity Hospital (Portugal). Most mothers and fathers show positive emotions and only a few of them showed negative emotions toward the infant. Maternal and paternal emotional involvement toward the newborn tend to be similar; nevertheless, fathers show less fear and better emotional involvement with the neonate, while mothers are sadder and show more emotions not related to bonding. During the first days following delivery, emotions not related to bonding, such as fear, seem to decrease in mothers.Bial Foundation - Grant 58/02.Human Development and Health Service of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation - Grant 48914

Sports and Child Development

Despite the relevance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills for professional success, their formation is not yet fully understood. This study fills part of this gap by analyzing the effect of sports club participation, one of the most popular extra-curricular activities, on children’s skill development. Our results indicate positive effects: both cognitive skills, measured by school performance, and overall non-cognitive skills improve by 0.13 standard deviations. The results are robust when using alternative datasets as well as alternative estimation and identification strategies. The effects can be partially explained by increased physical activities replacing passive leisure activities.skill formation, non-cognitive skills, physical activity, semi-parametric estimation

Handedness and Child Development

Left-handedness is historically associated with poorer outcomes for adults. Yet recent work has suggested that there may be positive labour market returns for left-handed males. This paper examines whether handedness is also associated with poorer outcomes for children and whether this differs by genders. The paper examines a wide set of outcomes for children as they age from 42 months to 14 years. We find the main penalty is not from being left-handed, but is from not having a dominant hand early in life. This penalty is larger for girls than boys by age 14, indicating that early deficits of non-right handed boys appear to fall as they age. For girls, being left-handed and especially mixed-handed at early ages is associated with persistent cognitive attainment deficits, mainly focused at the lower end of the ability distribution.Handedness, child outcomes

Sports and Child Development

Despite the relevance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills for professional success, their formation is not yet fully understood. This study fills part of this gap by analyzing the effect of sports club participation, one of the most popular extra-curricular activities, on children's skill development. Our results indicate positive effects: both cognitive skills, measured by school performance, and overall non-cognitive skills improve by 0.13 standard deviations. The results are robust when using alternative datasets as well as alternative estimation and identification strategies. The effects can be partially explained by increased physical activities replacing passive leisure activities.skill formation, non-cognitive skills, physical activity, semi-parametric estimation

Sport and Child Development

Despite the relevance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills for professional success, their formation is not yet fully understood. This study fills part of this gap by analyzing the role of sports club participation, one of the most popular extra-curricular activities, on children’s skill development. Our results indicate positive effects: school performance improves by 0.20 standard deviations and overall non-cognitive skills by 0.09 standard deviations. The results are robust when using alternative datasets as well as alternative estimation and identification strategies. The effects can be partially explained by increased physical activities replacing passive leisure activities.Skill formation, non-cognitive skills, physical activity, semi-parametric estimation

Income and Child Development

We examine how income influences pre-school children’s cognitive and behavioral development, using new data from a birth cohort study of children born at the end of the 20th century. On average, low income children have lower PPVT scores, more mother-reported aggressive, withdrawn, and anxious behavior problems, and also more interviewer-reported problems with behavior, than more affluent children. For most outcomes, differences in the home environments are sufficient to explain the link between low income and poorer child outcomes. Policy simulations indicate that income transfers can potentially play an important role in reducing gaps in development between poorer and richer children.

CHAD 60: Child Development Course Redesign

Poster summarizing course redesign activities for CHAD 60: Child Development.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/davinci_itcr2014/1014/thumbnail.jp

Is there a place for work in child development? Implications of child development theory and research for interpretation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, with particular reference to Article 32, on children, work and exploitation

This paper is about the role of child-development knowledge and research in international efforts to improve the lives and prospects for millions of working children. Article 32 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is framed in psychological terms. It declares that children must be protected from work that is harmful to their ’physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development’. The Convention presumes a universal concept of ’development’ and ’harm’ (in terms of what is healthy, natural or adjusted and in terms of adverse effects of work). Most textbooks of child development appear to confirm beliefs about universal, natural features of child development. But our knowledge about the abilities, needs and interests of children during successive stages of their lives is based on highly specific (mainly Euro-American) cultural contexts for childhood and goals for development. There is little space for work within this view of child development. This paper presents the case for a sociocultural approach to child development, as a more globally appropriate basis for evaluating the place of work in children’s lives. The concept of ’developmental niche’ is offered as a starting-point for understanding the place of work and evaluating its positive and negative effects in specific contexts. Relinquishing universal child-development knowledge sets new challenges for policy and for research. In the long term it has the potential to inform the implementation of UN Convention principles in context-appropriate and child-sensitive ways