Children's Everyday Research Articles

Acceptability of a Novel Parent-Mediated Executive Function Intervention for Young Children With Down Syndrome in Italy.

People with Down syndrome (DS) are predisposed to challenges with executive functions (EF), which are crucial for adaptive outcomes and academic success. Early interventions targeting EF are therefore critical. The present study analysed Italian data on the acceptability, enjoyability and household implementation of EXPO (EXecutive function Play Opportunities), a novel caregiver-mediated intervention designed to strengthen EF skills in young children with DS. Nineteen families of children aged 42-93 months participated. Caregivers completed questions via a smartphone app and provided feedback through Mid-Point and Exit questionnaires. Implementation and enjoyment remained consistent throughout the intervention. Caregivers reported positive effects of EXPO on children's everyday life skills and found the coaching sessions beneficial for successful program implementation. The EXPO intervention is acceptable and enjoyable for both caregivers and children, with caregivers reporting perceived improvements in children's everyday life skills after participating in the program.

Young Children's and Caregivers' Evaluations About Household Helping: Balancing the Interests of Helper and Recipient.

Young children's helping can benefit both recipient and helper. This study examined how children and caregivers incorporate helper and recipient interests in evaluations of household helping. Data were collected throughout 2022. US children 4-6 years (N = 87; 47 girls, 40 boys; 71% European American, 23% Asian American, 14% Latinx, 3% Black, 2% Native American) and their caregivers were evaluated whether and why a child in hypothetical scenarios should help their parent. Children's judgments and reasoning incorporated both child helper and parent recipient interests, whereas caregivers' evaluations weighed child interests more heavily, ORs > 0.239. Caregiver judgments about obligation predicted children's judgments. Findings suggest that perceptions of whose interests are served shape judgments and decisions around young children's everyday prosocial behaviors.

‘Can You Please Sit Still?!’: Exploring the Dynamics of Children's Sedentary Behaviours at Home

ABSTRACTSedentary behaviour among children has become an area of interest in health research due to its associations with unfavourable health outcomes. Concerns about certain activities being sedentary guides much work in this field, with study outcomes often directed towards determining the amount of time spent in these activities. In this paper, we explore the idea of thinking about sedentary moments within children's everyday practices instead of total time spent in sedentary behaviours. Through this approach we examine children's everyday practices to show how activities by themselves should not necessarily be considered sedentary, but as composed of sedentary moments that are performed. We also look at how such sedentary moments are created, and the ways in which they are linked to material arrangements and pervasive understandings about how certain practices should be conducted. These could be seen as instruments of power acting upon the body, shaped by discourses about childhood and family life.

Does Play-Based Learning Support Children's Everyday Resiliency? A Cross-Case Analysis of Parents' and Kindergarten Teachers' Perceptions of Play-Based Learning as a Precedent to Young Children's Coping During the Pandemic-Affected 2020-2021 School Year.

Play has long been credited with fostering self-regulation in young children, though few studies have examined how children draw upon early childhood experiences with play to navigate adversity later in childhood. The purpose of this study is to describe the facets of the children's everyday resiliency that were attributed to their play-based experiences by parents and teachers as they reflected on the children's kindergarten experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used a cross-case study design to examine the positive coping strategies parents and teachers observed in three five-year-old girls and one six-year-old boy entering kindergarten during the 2020-2021 pandemic-affected school year. We recruited parent participants based on their child's enrollment at a Reggio Emilia-inspired, play-based early childhood center in Northern Colorado for three or more years prior to entering kindergarten. Once parents enrolled in the study, we extended an invitation to their child's kindergarten teacher to participate. Data included three one-hour interviews with each participant, field visits during remote learning, and artifact collection over the course of the school year. Cross-case analysis revealed four themes: "Willing to Adjust", "Understands the Situation", "Uses Advanced Language", and "Embraces Challenge". Participants describe these children as willing to adjust to public health orders, having a deep understanding of the pandemic's societal repercussions, using sophisticated language to process adversity, and embracing the challenge of becoming kindergarteners. Participants believed these children's experiences with play-based learning promoted the interdisciplinary development of their social language, persistence, altruism, and cognitive flexibility; these traits fostered the children's positive coping strategies throughout the pandemic-affected kindergarten year.

Emotion understanding among institutionalized preschool children in India: A visual-based approach.

The present study aimed to develop two visual tasks to assess the emotion understanding of institutionalized preschool children in India. To enhance the psychometric qualities of both tasks, content validity and inter-rater reliability assessments, translation-back translation and a rigorous peer review process were undertaken. In addition, the tool's components were mapped with institutionalized children's everyday experiences to help them better relate to the task. The tool development phase was followed by the assessment phase. Eighteen participants (nine males, nine females) aged 3-6 years were purposefully selected from three childcare institutions. The emotion identification task required children to identify the correct emotions from the cartoon characters' facial expressions and gestures, whereas, in the emotion situation task, children were asked to infer others' emotions from a vignette depicted by a picture card. Children's responses were videotaped, analysed and coded for both tasks. The study's key findings revealed that institutionalized children responded more accurately to emotion situation tasks yet struggled to identify sadness, anger and fear emotions compared to happiness. Furthermore, qualitative insights provided a comprehensive understanding and interpretation of the findings.

A cross-linguistic examination of young children's everyday language experiences.

We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2-36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting that target-child-directed speech quantities are stable across early development, while adult-directed speech decreases. A preponderance of speech from women was found to a similar degree across groups, with less target-child-directed speech from men and children in the North American samples than elsewhere. Consistently across groups, children also heard more adult-directed than target-child-directed speech. Finally, the numbers of talkers present in any given clip strongly impacted children's moment-to-moment input quantities. These findings illustrate how the structure of home life impacts patterns of early language exposure across diverse developmental contexts.

Living Journals: introducing a new digital participatory approach to study young children’s digital media practices

ABSTRACT Researching daily activities of young children poses methodological challenges that necessitate diverse approaches for effective inquiry. This method article introduces a new digital participatory research method – Living Journals – to study young children's everyday digital media practices at home in Azerbaijan. Employing this method, mothers actively produced multimodal data in situ, responding to prompts sent by the researcher, which were subsequently turned into journals in print and digital formats. Utilising these journals, participant families were encouraged to provide commentary on their respective journals and those of other participating children. This method has a significant capacity to yield metatextual, multivocal, multimodal, and multifunctional data, thereby enhancing the richness of the dataset and facilitating nuanced interpretations. Delving into the intricacies of the method and its advantages, the article elaborates on its procedures, significance, and limitations. The method emerges as a valuable approach, offering a participatory and contextually sensitive means for remotely generating data, allowing researchers to develop textually and visually rich datasets.

Pushing against the panic: Considering the positives of TikTok and children

This short commentary is intended to be provocative, as we argue the importance of considering ‘other’ aspects of children's everyday experiences of TikTok. We argue the need to be cautious about how the risks of TikTok, and digital platforms at large, for children are often amplified at the expense of erasing public awareness about the joy, connection, and creativity that many children and young people also experience on these emerging platforms. Through this work, we call for a shift in perspective in our research community: a shift that moves away from the assumptions (re)produced by policymakers and media, towards an approach grounded in children's everyday experiences so as to consider the implications of TikTok for children in a positive and generative manner.

A Multi-Modal IoT Framework for Healthy Nutritional Choices in Everyday Childhood Life

Policies, standards and recommendations for healthy childhood nutritional choices are well-defined and widely available, yet a significant percentage of children as well as parents and caregivers, fail to become aware and follow them despite the intense technological penetration and information abundance in everyday life. The aim of this work was to establish an IoT-integrated framework parlaying the current technological platforms’ capabilities to streamline the aforementioned policies, standards, and recommendations in a transparent, highly adoptable, and attractive scheme for children while being minimally demanding for responsible adults through a set of readily available innovative services and smart devices. The rationale was to obtain information concerning nutritional choices and habits with minimum intervention through smart devices, minimizing user deviation from everyday routines in order to consolidate, visualize, and exploit this information in an engaging and motivating gaming environment, maximizing visual impact while maintaining a minimal computational footprint.

From the lab to the classroom: Improving children's prospective memory in a natural setting.

Laboratory-based studies have shown that children's ability to remember intentions (i.e., prospective memory; PM) can be improved by asking them to imagine performing the PM task beforehand (i.e., episodic future thinking; EFT) or to predict their PM performance. Moreover, combining the two strategies resulted in an additional improvement in children's PM performance. However, the effectiveness of these encoding strategies on real-life PM tasks is still unknown. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of EFT instructions, performance predictions, and of their combination on children's PM in a natural setting, namely in the classroom. Twelve classes composed by a total of 121 children (53% females) aged between seven and 9 years participated to the study. As a PM task, children were asked by their teachers to deliver a letter to their parents and to bring it back to school the next day. Children were divided into four groups: control, prediction, EFT, and the EFT + prediction group. Parent reports on children's everyday prospective and retrospective memory failures were also collected. Results showed that encoding strategies were effective in enhancing children's PM performance. However, differences compared to previous laboratory-based findings emerged since predicting PM performance resulted to be most effective in enhancing real-life PM performance. Moreover, parent reports were related to children's PM performance. These novel findings highlight the importance of studying PM interventions in natural settings in order to increase their ecological validity and inform educational practices.

Young Children & Implicit Racial Biases

Abstract Children are not born harboring racial biases, but they are born learning. Young children, even infants, learn from the “mere observation” of other people's behavior. Nonverbal signals of racial biases are abundant in children's everyday social environments. Studies show that preschool children acquire social group biases when they observe other people's social interactions and nonverbal behaviors. These new findings have implications for child development and educational equity. Even before kindergarten, racial biases are caught even when not explicitly taught, suggesting the need for practical actions for parents, teachers, and others concerned about the transmission of racial bias across generations.

1941-1945 ЖЫЛДАРДАҒЫ СОҒЫС КЕЗІНДЕГІ ҚАЗАҚСТАНДАҒЫ БАЛАЛАРДЫҢ КҮНДЕЛІКТІ ЕҢБЕГІ

The article explores the issues of labor children's everyday life in the Kazakh SSR during the Great Patriotic War. Labor during the war years became an integral part of children's life in the rear areas of the USSR. Children’s involvement in labor, both domestic and public, was a common practice in the USSR, but during the war years it became an objective necessity. Based on archival data, the authors study the types of pioneers’ social work and schoolchildren in the regions of the Kazakh SSR and their real contribution to the common cause, the role of propaganda and agitation of selfless labor of the younger generation. Based on interview materials the authors investigated the issues of children's labor in everyday life in the cities and rural areas, revealed the specifics of the volume and degree of severity of children's labor depending on the place of their residence, family composition and its material well-being. A unique source for the study of children's labor in everyday life was a boy's diary, where the child told about the hardships and difficulties that befell his family, also his help for the relatives. The authors of the article studied the issues related to the labor education of adolescents at schools of factory tutoring, vocational and railroad institutes, and what was the main reason for the growth in the enrollment of these educational institutions.

Early word learning is influenced by physical environments.

During word learning moments, toddlers experience labels and objects in particular environments. Do toddlers learn words better when the physical environment creates contrasts between objects with different labels? Thirty-six 21- to 24-month-olds (92% White, 22 female, data collected 8/21-4/22) learned novel words for novel objects presented using an apparatus that mimicked a shape-sorter toy. The manipulation concerned whether or not the physical features of the environments in which objects occurred heightened the contrasts between the objects. Toddlers only learned labels for objects presented in environments where the apparatus heightened the contrast between the objects (b = .068). These results emphasize the importance of investigating word learning in physical environments that more closely approximate young children's everyday experiences with objects.

Motor Development in Children with Cerebral Palsy in Sweden-A Population-Based Longitudinal Register Study.

The aim was to explore longitudinal motor development in children with cerebral palsy (CP) in Sweden with respect to the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS). In this national CP registry-based study, 2138 children aged 0.5-19 years participated (42% girls). The distribution with respect to GMFCS was I: 49%, II: 16%, III: 10%, IV: 14%, and V: 11%. In total, 5538 assessments (mean 2.7, min-max: 1-9) with the Gross Motor Function Measure-66 were included. Data were analysed using non-linear mixed-effects regression models, and the Stable Limit Model was selected to fit data. Five distinct curves of predicted gross motor development with respect to GMFCS levels were obtained. The achieved motor development was maintained over time. The estimated average GMFM-66 limit and the average age when 90% of the expected limits were reached were at GMFCS I: 88 at age 4.5; GMFCS II: 71 at age 4.2; GMFCS III: 54 at age 3.1; GMFCS IV: 38 at age 2.6, and at GMFCS V: 18 at age 0.9. In conclusion, this is the first national population-based study following motor development in CP. Five distinct curves reported in previous controlled research studies were confirmed. Our study adds knowledge about motor development captured in children's everyday context.

Addressing Maternal Perceived Fears in Supervising Children's Mobility

Children's independent mobility positively impacts their physical and mental well-being. However, parents' concerns regarding neighbourhood safety often restrict the capability of children to explore their surroundings independently. Our study of various parenting methods for supporting children's everyday use of public space is based on maternal perception of fears and the subsequent impact of those fears on children's limited exposure to spatial mobility. The study employs a qualitative retrospective approach to interview mothers in the Jakarta Metropolitan Area. We selected mothers with an argument that the impact of maternal figures on children's mobility is more significant than that of fathers. The research suggests that mobility experienced by mothers increases their perceived fears resulting in parenting practices that tend to discourage children from independently navigating public spaces. This study demonstrates that a significant reduction in women's ability to have independent mobility throughout their life course may affect their parenting methods in introducing spatial knowledge to children.

The BabyView camera: Designing a new head-mounted camera to capture children's early social and visual environments.

Head-mounted cameras have been used in developmental psychology research for more than a decade to provide a rich and comprehensive view of what infants see during their everyday experiences. However, variation between these devices has limited the field's ability to compare results across studies and across labs. Further, the video data captured by these cameras to date has been relatively low-resolution, limiting how well machine learning algorithms can operate over these rich video data. Here, we provide a well-tested and easily constructed design for a head-mounted camera assembly-the BabyView-developed in collaboration with Daylight Design, LLC., a professional product design firm. The BabyView collects high-resolution video, accelerometer, and gyroscope data from children approximately 6-30 months of age via a GoPro camera custom mounted on a soft child-safety helmet. The BabyView also captures a large, portrait-oriented vertical field-of-view that encompasses both children's interactions with objects and with their social partners. We detail our protocols for video data management and for handling sensitive data from home environments. We also provide customizable materials for onboarding families with the BabyView. We hope that these materials will encourage the wide adoption of the BabyView, allowing the field to collect high-resolution data that can link children's everyday environments with their learning outcomes.

Co-creation of educational commons spaces to reverse inequalities: project SMOOTH and the Children's Club.

This article presents an action-research project from the EU-funded SMOOTH project, which focuses on the potential of Educational Commons to address educational inequalities. The project adopts an emergent paradigm that views spaces for collaboration, content co-creation, socialization, governance, and play as catalysts for reversing inequalities. The action-research, conducted in a disadvantaged non-formal education setting in northern Portugal, involved children aged 8-10 years old. Over a span of 10 months, the innovative action-research program aimed to achieve several objectives: (1) reversing inequalities faced by vulnerable social groups, (2) strengthening inter-cultural and inter-generational dialogue and social integration, (3) developing essential social and personal skills, and (4) creating smooth spaces of democratic citizenship based on equality, collaboration, sharing, and caring. By understanding the tensions and conflicts that emerge in children's everyday situations, the project sought to build and foster community through embracing differences. This article analyzes the characteristics, behaviors, challenges, and strengths observed during the 30 sessions. The results provide insights into the dimensions of Children as commoners, in terms of sharing and care, cooperation and collective creativity and active citizenship. This research contributes to the exploration of Educational Commons as a means to promote equity and transform educational contexts.

Political Socialization of Soviet Schoolchildren as Part of Children's Public Diplomacy: International Visits

The article describes the concept of political socialization of Soviet schoolchildren based on children's public diplomacy in 1982–1986. The authors concentrated on the international visits made by Samantha Smith and Yekaterina Lychyova. The research did not involve other factors of political socialization, e.g., weekly political information, fundraising events for the starving children of Africa and Nicaragua, foreign pen-palls, etc. These international visits provided valuable practical experience of interaction between Soviet and foreign children. Children's diplomacy is a relatively new phenomenon for Russian historiography, and the authors attempted to define its theoretical and symbolic meaning. The ideology-affected political socialization transformed children's everyday life, depriving it of the freedom of choice and opportunities. The analysis of children's diplomacy with its potential opportunities and shortcomings made it possible to determine the bottlenecks of political socialization. It revealed the tension between the public and private dimensions of international politics and actualized the factor of transnational activity in the development of bilateral Soviet-American relations. The research relied on the personal experience of those children, their memories, memoirs of their contemporaries, media publications, etc. The project of children's diplomacy failed because it deviated from its original scenario. Every time the process was out of direct control of political elites, children’s psychology and behavior interfered with the plan.

Being parents of extremely preterm children, from a long-term perspective: A qualitative study of parents' experiences

BackgroundIn recent decades, modern neonatal intensive care has improved, increasing the survival of extremely preterm children. Few studies have examined the experiences of parents of extremely preterm children from a long-term perspective. AimTo describe parents' experiences of parenting extremely preterm children during their childhood and transition to adulthood. Study designA qualitative interview study with a descriptive design. SubjectsThirteen parents of eleven children born at 24 gestational weeks in Sweden, 1990–1992, participated in individual semi-structured interviews. Outcome measuresData were analyzed using qualitative reflexive thematic analysis. ResultFive themes forming a timeline were created in the analytic process: parenthood, at the NICU, young childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Various aspects affecting parenthood were described throughout the timeline, and occasionally the parents experienced difficulties dealing with their children's special physical and/or mental needs. Today, some families have established a functioning situation despite their children's physical and/or mental difficulties, while some still struggle with their children's everyday life. ConclusionHaving an extremely preterm family member profoundly affects the whole family for various lengths of time. Parents expressed a need for support from both healthcare and school throughout their children's childhood and in their transition to adulthood, although the need varies between parent–child pairs. By studying the parents' experiences, their need for support can be further recognized and understood, and developed and improved accordingly.

Unfinalizability: An exploration of a young child’s emergent identities through living stories

Drawing on a Bakhtinian idea of unfinalizability and a semiotics lens of multimodality, the authors conceptualize children's everyday narratives as chains of living stories that emerge at home and in early childhood education settings. In this study, the authors interpret the living stories and emergent identities of Dylan, a five-year-old Vietnamese boy, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Two narrative chains of Dylan's living stories were selected to represent his intersecting and emergent identities around the significant event of the birth of his sibling, when he became the eldest brother. The findings will inspire early childhood educators and researchers to value learnings derived from stories and use the pedagogy of unfinalizability in their interactions with young children.