Using three-wave longitudinal data of 554 Chinese youth (mean age = 13.35 years; 50% girls; T1 = July 2020, T2 = January 2021, T3 = July 2021), this study examined how youth's views of teens regarding family obligation predict their academic functioning and relationship with parents, with attention to the mediating role of youth's sense of responsibility to parents. Results showed that views of teens regarding family obligation predicted youth's greater academic delay of gratification, motivational response to academic failure, and attachment security to mother and father over time. Importantly, youth's sense of responsibility to parents mediated the longitudinal associations between views of teens and their academic and social adjustment. Taken together, the findings elucidate why and how views of teens matter for positive youth development in a culturally sensitive manner.

As adults, we do not expect ignorant agents to behave randomly or always get things wrong. Instead, we expect them to act reasonably, guided by past experiences. We test whether 4-to-6-year-olds share this intuition and use it to infer others' knowledge, or whether they rely on a simple "ignorance = error" heuristic identified in past work. Across three pre-registered experiments (n = 264 4-to-6-year-olds recruited in the US between 2018-2022; demographic data not collected), we find that 4-year-olds expect agents to draw on past experiences when acting in new situations. However, only 6-year-olds reliably use this expectation to infer others' knowledge from behavior. These findings suggest that by age 6, children use a causal model of how ignorance shapes behavior, and not just a cue-based understanding of epistemic states.

This meta-analysis examined main effects and heterogeneity in associations between popularity and academic adjustment in the U.S. and China across 41 studies. The aggregated sample included 22,151 children and adolescents (10,934 boys; 11,217 girls) from both countries, with U.S. students from various ethnic backgrounds. Results in the U.S. were characterized by developmental differences, with popularity positively linked to academic functioning only in childhood (r = 0.26) but not adolescence (r = 0.01). Conversely, popularity was consistently related to academic adjustment in China across developmental stages (overall r = 0.36). Patterns in both nations were unaffected by other demographic meta-moderators but shifted after social acceptance was partialled out. Observed cross-national differences should be interpreted with caution, and potential caveats were discussed.

This study examined the development of emotion understanding. Children (N = 296, 157 boys, 139 girls) and parents (67% White, 8% Black, 15% Hispanic, 2% Asian American, 6% Biracial, 2% "Other") recruited from Denver, Colorado were observed annually for four years starting in 2019 (beginning Mage = 2.44 years, SD = 0.26) discussing a wordless storybook featuring illustrated emoters expressing joy, sadness, fear, anger, or disgust towards a referent (e.g., dropped ice cream). Analyses revealed changes and bidirectional relations in children's and parents' emoter talk and referent talk across early childhood, as well as differences in parent and child relative emoter-referent emphasis for discrete emotions. Implications for the ontogeny and socialization of young children's emotion understanding will be discussed.

Prioritizing what information to learn based on value is a critical developmental skill. Across two studies, value-based memory was assessed predominately in White children aged 6- to 7-years-old and 9- to 10-years-old using a nationwide sample collected between 2020 and 2023. Children learned cue-target associations worth varying point values. Experiment 1 (N = 77, Nfemales = 39) demonstrated that both age groups prioritized learning high-value information across varying task demands (Cohen's d = 0.36). Experiment 2 (N = 77, Nfemales = 34) demonstrated that children also self-regulated their learning and actively selected to study and remember items based on value (Cohen's d = 0.75). However, older children were more effective at translating their value-based study choices into prioritizing recall of high-value information.

Despite the ubiquity of variation in child development within individuals, across groups, and across tasks, timescales, and contexts, dominant methods in developmental science and education research still favor group averages, short snapshots of time, and single environments. The Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) is a framework designed to enable coordinated data collection by research teams worldwide, with the goal of measuring variability in children's learning and development. The LEVANTE measure set aims to capture variability in learning outcomes (literacy and numeracy) as well as in core cognitive and social constructs. LEVANTE will yield a large, open access longitudinal dataset for long-term research use, both creating a multidisciplinary research network and facilitating the science of learning variability.

Increasing global diversity of children and families calls for developmental sciences to incorporate the dynamic interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, and other contextual experiences. However, navigating ecological and cultural theories defies our disciplinary-based training. Promoting interdisciplinary multisector research is necessary. With parenting as a lens, I described my journey toward increasingly interdisciplinary and multisector research. Interactions among ethnicity, community, and socioeconomic status varied by developmental stage and context, resulting in revisiting conceptualizations of parenting. Further, through research-practice partnerships, cultivating a sense of purpose, apart from educational and career goals, emerged as significant for maintaining academic engagement and navigating an unstable and insecure job market. As president of SRCD (2021-2023), I emphasized and catalyzed transdisciplinary, multisector research to support children and families.

The present study examined the role of gene-environment correlations in the association between parent-child similarity in negative emotionality and addressed whether it is mediated by negative or warm parenting, assessed when children were between 7 and 15 years old. Participants included 843 children from 493 families in the Colorado Adoption Project (48% female, 95% White, 5% Hispanic). Results indicated that passive rGE may contribute to associations between parents' and children's negative emotionality assessed at age 16 years. Additionally, negative parenting partially mediated the association between biological mothers' negative emotionality and children's negative emotionality. Results were not consistent with evocative rGE. Studies of parent-child similarity should consider plausible alternative hypotheses, such as gene-environment correlation, rather than assuming environmental mediation.

The home numeracy environment is suggested to influence children's numerical development, but causal evidence for this assertion remains limited. Addressing this gap, we randomly assigned 117 predominantly White 4-5-year-olds (M = 4.68 years, SD = 0.2, 47% girls) attending preschool in Flanders (Belgium) to either an experimental (numeracy) or an active control (language) condition. The 6-week intervention (pretest-March 2023; posttest-May 2023) consisted of an ecologically valid implementation, with parents integrating flexible activities into their routines. Pre- and post-intervention assessments measured children's numerical skills. Medium effects were observed on transcoding and ordering skills, providing causal evidence for the impact of the home numeracy environment on children's numeracy. This study highlights the potential of ecologically valid interventions to support early numeracy in daily life.

Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather information for learning. Here, caregiver-infant dyads (N = 222, 2-6-months-old, all female caregivers; data collected 2022-2023) in South Africa and Malawi engaged in naturalistic play before their interactions were hand-annotated to measure caregiver predictability and infant gaze. In both countries, temporal variation in caregiver predictability shaped infant looking dynamics-infants attended to specific sensory signals (η2 = 0.04) and specific timepoints (η2 = 0.10) that were useful for them based on their caregiver's typical behavior. These findings provide a framework by which the predictability of caregiver behavior may shape fundamental, early optimization of visual attention for learning in infancy and later cognitive development.