Difficulties In Young Children Research Articles

Applying a Developmental Framework to the Self‐Regulatory Difficulties of Young Children with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure: A Review

Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) can be associated with significant difficulties in self-regulatory abilities. As such, interventions have been developed that focus on improving varying aspects of self-regulation for this population. The application of a multilevel theoretical framework that describes the development of self-regulation during early childhood could further advance the field. First, this framework could assist in elucidating mechanisms in the trajectories of early adjustment problems in this population and, second, informing the development of more precise assessment and interventions for those affected by PAE. The aims of the current review were to provide an overview of the self-regulatory framework proposed by Calkins and colleagues (e.g., Calkins, 2007; Calkins and Fox, 2002); examine the self-regulatory difficulties that are commonly experienced during infancy (i.e., 0 to 2years) and early childhood (i.e., 3 to 8years) in children with PAE in the context of the developmental framework; and describe how the framework can inform the development of future assessment and intervention provision for young children with PAE. The application of a developmental framework, such as proposed by Calkins and colleagues, allows for a systematic and theoretically driven approach to assessment and intervention programs for young children with PAE.

Young children's preference for solitary play: Implications for socio-emotional and school adjustment.

The purpose of this study was to provide additional psychometric support for the Preference for Solitary Play Interview (PSPI) and to examine the associations between self-reported preference for solitary play and indices of adjustment in early childhood. Participants were N=340 children attending kindergarten and grade 1. Children completed the PSPI, and teachers provided assessments of children's socio-emotional and school adjustment. In support of the validity of the PSPI, preference for solitary play was positively associated with asocial behaviours. Further, preference for solitary play displayed an indirect (but not direct) association with peer exclusion via asocial behaviours. Findings are discussed in terms of the social and behavioural implications of preference for solitary play in early childhood. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children who spend more time alone are at increased risk of adjustment difficulties. However, some individuals desire to spend time alone because of an appreciation for solitude. A preference for solitude is not associated with negative adjustment in adults and older youth. What does this study add? This study is among the first to examine self-reported preference for solitary in early childhood. Preference for solitude may not be related to emotional or school difficulties in young children. However, a heightened display of solitary behaviours may still evoke negative responses from peers.

Analogical processes in children’s understanding of spatial representations.

We propose that map reading can be construed as a form of analogical mapping. We tested 2 predictions that follow from this claim: First, young children's patterns of performance in map reading tasks should parallel those found in analogical mapping tasks; and, second, children will benefit from guided alignment instructions that help them see the relational correspondences between the map and the space. In 4 experiments, 3-year-olds completed a map reading task in which they were asked to find hidden objects in a miniature room, using a corresponding map. We manipulated the availability of guided alignment (showing children the analogical mapping between maps and spaces; Experiments 1, 2, and 3a), the format of guided alignment (gesture or relational language; Experiment 2), and the iconicity of maps (Experiments 3a and 3b). We found that (a) young children's difficulties in map reading follow from known patterns of analogical development-for example, focusing on object similarity over relational similarity; and (b) guided alignment based on analogical reasoning led to substantially better performance. Results also indicated that children's map reading performance was affected by the format of guided alignment, the iconicity of the maps, and the order of tasks. The results bear on the developmental mechanisms underlying young children's learning of spatial representations and also suggest ways to support this learning. (PsycINFO Database Record

Motor and coordination difficulties in children with emotional and behavioural difficulties

ABSTRACTTo date, very few studies have explored the incidence of motor impairment amongst children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (social, emotional and mental health (SEMH); formerly SEBD in England). Following research that suggests an increase in motor difficulties in young children and adolescents with SEMH difficulties, this study compares profiles of motor ability using the Movement ABC-2 assessment in children attending a specialist SEMH primary school with a typically developing comparison group and children with a diagnosis of developmental coordination disorder. We report an increased prevalence of borderline or clinically significant motor impairment amongst children with SEMH difficulties compared to the comparison group, with 44% of the SEMH special school sample falling within these ranges. We suggest that bearing in mind the increased likelihood for motor impairment is important in SEMH education, as it has likely impact on classroom functioning and ability and motivation to take part in socially and academically relevant activities.

Sleep Tight, Act Right: Negative Affect, Sleep and Behavior Problems During Early Childhood.

Temperamental negative affect and insufficient sleep have been independently associated with behavior problems during early childhood. However, it is unknown whether these factors interact to contribute to behavioral difficulties in young children. The current study examined the interactions between temperamental negative affect and both sleep onset time and sleep midpoint, assessed by actigraphy, in predicting externalizing and internalizing behaviors in a sample of 117 children (34-69months of age). Children with high temperamental negative affect and either later sleep onset time or later sleep midpoint were more likely to exhibit externalizing and internalizing behaviors. These results emphasize the association between temperamental negative affect and behavioral difficulties, particularly for children with insufficient sleep.

How to approach feeding difficulties in young children.

Feeding is an interaction between a child and caregiver, and feeding difficulty is an umbrella term encompassing all feeding problems, regardless of etiology, severity, or consequences, while feeding disorder refers to an inability or refusal to eat sufficient quantities or variety of food to maintain adequate nutritional status, leading to substantial consequences, including malnutrition, impaired growth, and possible neurocognitive dysfunction. There are 6 representative feeding disorder subtypes in young children: infantile anorexia, sensory food aversion, reciprocity, posttraumatic type, state regulation, and feeding disorders associated with concurrent medical conditions. Most feeding difficulties are nonorganic and without any underlying medical condition, but organic causes should also be excluded from the beginning, through thorough history taking and physical examination, based on red-flag symptoms and signs. Age-appropriate feeding principles may support effective treatment of feeding difficulties in practice, and systematic approaches for feeding difficulties in young children, based on each subtype, may be beneficial.

Parent-implemented home therapy programmes for speech and language: a systematic review.

Parent-delivered home programmes are frequently used to remediate speech and language difficulties in young children. However, the evidence base for this service delivery model is limited. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate the effectiveness of parent-implemented home programmes in facilitating the development of children's speech and language skills, and to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and feasibility of this service delivery method. A systematic search of the PsycINFO, CINAHL and ERIC databases was conducted. Quality appraisal of individual studies was conducted. Findings from each of the studies were then integrated to report on outcomes for the child, the parent and the service. There is preliminary evidence that home programmes can lead to growth in a child's speech and language skills and are more effective than no intervention, provided the home programmes are used with high dosage rates and direct parent training. Home programmes are a potentially useful service delivery model, but caution should be exercised when considering their use to address broader service delivery challenges. Further high-level evidence is needed across all facets of this service delivery model.

Reading Difficulties in Young Children

Despite decades of research on reading development and instructional practices that promote reading proficiency, millions of children in the United States still fail to acquire adequate reading skills. This article discusses factors that influence children’s difficulties in reading acquisition, but which have received less attention, relative to basic early literacy skills. Specifically, vocabulary knowledge, behavioral regulation, teacher knowledge and school factors, and individualized instruction predict whether children develop proficient reading skills. Particularly, they explain the reading difficulties of demographic groups that have historically experienced the lowest reading achievement: children living in poverty and English learners. The article offers recommendations and implications for policy.

The relation between spatial perspective taking and inhibitory control in 6-year-old children.

Developmental research on spatial perspective taking has shown that young children are able to solve perspective-taking problems under favorable circumstances, but they have difficulties succeeding in classic tasks involving a conflict between one's own perspective and that of another observer. To date, little is known about the reasons for young children's difficulties in dealing with incongruent perspectives. Based on the assumption that one's own perspective has to be ignored to imagine someone else's perspective, it was investigated whether perspective taking is related to inhibitory control in 6-year-olds (N=140). An adapted version of the 'Fruit Stroop task', appropriate for preschool children, was used to assess inhibitory control. Perspective taking was assessed using the 'Perspective-Taking Test for Children'. Other spatial and nonspatial abilities were assessed to investigate the specificity of the relation. Results showed a significant correlation between perspective taking and inhibitory control, even when controlled for age, verbal-IQ, and socio-economic status. However, no significant correlations between inhibition and other spatial abilities were found, indicating a specific relation between inhibition and perspective taking. A linear regression analysis showed that, even after accounting for effects of control variables as well as other mental transformation abilities, inhibition accounted for a significant part of the variance in perspective-taking performance. The present findings provide valuable information on what contributes to individual differences in perspective taking, which is an important aspect of everyday cognition and bears relevance for reasoning in technical domains.

The Toileting Habit Profile Questionnaire: Screening for sensory-based toileting difficulties in young children with constipation and retentive fecal incontinence

ABSTRACTThis study examined the face and preliminary content validity of the Toileting Habit Profile Questionnaire, a tool designed to screen for sensory-based defecation difficulties in children. A panel of experts reviewed a pilot version of the questionnaire and responded to probe questions. Two reviewers conducted direct content analysis of responses; 100% agreement was reached. Experts demonstrated a high degree of agreement and their input was useful in establishing this tool for initial research and clinical use. The Toileting Habit Profile Questionnaire appears to capture behaviors that are consistent with problematic toileting behaviors, particularly as they relate to sensory overreactivity.

Young Children's Reports of When Events Occurred: Do Event Type and Assessment Method Matter?

Studying young children's reporting about when various events occurred informs about the development of episodic memory and metacognition. In two experiments, 55 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children participated in two activity sessions, a week apart. During the activity sessions, they learned novel animal facts and body movements, and they coloured animal pictures and posed for body movement photos. Immediately after the second activity session, children were interviewed about when they experienced the various events. Overall, children were as accurate about learning events as physical events, but they were more accurate when asked temporal distance (e.g. ‘Which did you learn a longer time ago, “X” or “Y”?’) than temporal location questions (e.g. ‘Which did you learn before today, “X” or “Y”?’). The results suggest that young children's apparent difficulty recognizing new learning is not due to a rapid ‘remember‐to‐know shift’. Rather, the way we ask young children about when they experienced various events determines their accuracy. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Children's identification of questions from rising terminal pitch.

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their yes/no questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five- to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the basis of intonation alone. Children eight years of age or younger performed above chance levels but less accurately than adult listeners. To ascertain whether the verbal content of utterances interfered with young children's attention to the relevant acoustic cues, low-pass filtered versions of the same utterances were presented to children and adults in Experiment 2. Low-pass filtering reduced performance comparably for all age groups, perhaps because such filtering reduced the salience of critical pitch cues. Young children's difficulty in differentiating declarative questions from statements is not attributable to basic perceptual difficulties but rather to absent or unstable intonation categories.

Metaphors as Second Labels: Difficult for Preschool Children?

This study investigates the development of two cognitive abilities that are involved in metaphor comprehension: implicit analogical reasoning and assigning an unconventional label to a familiar entity (as in Romeo's 'Juliet is the sun'). We presented 3- and 4-year-old children with literal object-requests in a pretense setting (e.g., 'Give me the train with the hat'). Both age-groups succeeded in a baseline condition that used building blocks as props (e.g., placed either on the front or the rear of a train engine) and only required spatial analogical reasoning to interpret the referential expression. Both age-groups performed significantly worse in the critical condition, which used familiar objects as props (e.g., small dogs as pretend hats) and required both implicit analogical reasoning and assigning second labels. Only the 4-year olds succeeded in this condition. These results offer a new perspective on young children's difficulties with metaphor comprehension in the preschool years.

Longitudinal cognitive development of children born to mothers with opioid and polysubstance use.

Background:Previous studies indicate an increased risk for neuropsychological difficulties in young children prenatally exposed to opioids and polysubstances, but longitudinal information is scarce. The present longitudinal study investigated whether these waned, persisted, or increased over time.Methods:The cognitive functioning of 72 children with prenatal opioid and polysubstance exposure and 58 children without any established prenatal risk was assessed at 1, 2, 3, 4½, and 8½ y.Results:The exposed boys had significantly and stably lower levels of cognitive functioning than the control group, whereas there were increasing differences over time for the girls. The exposed group had significantly lower IQ scores than the control group on Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Revised at 8½ y after controlling for earlier cognitive abilities, and for children who were permanently placed in adoptive/foster homes before 1 y of age and whose mothers used heroin as their main drug during pregnancy (B = 17.04, 95% CI 8.69–25.38, P < 0.001).Conclusion:While effects of prenatal substance exposure cannot be isolated, group effects on cognition rather increased than waned over time, even in adoptive/foster children with minimal postnatal risk.

Screening for psychological difficulties in young children in crisis: complementary cross-cultural validation.

Detection of children's psychological difficulties in crises and low resource settings is challenged by the lack of a validated, rapid and simple tool. We present the results of two confirmatory validations of the Psychological Screening for Young Children aged 3 to 6 years (PSYCa 3-6) scale. We performed cross-cultural validations, assessing the performance of the scale in different contexts. These were conducted in Mathare, Nairobi, Kenya and Buenaventura, Colombia between December 2009 and February 2012. External validity was assessed comparing the PSYCa 3-6 against a clinical interview and the Clinical Global Impression Severity scale (CGI). A total of 160 mothers or caregivers of children 3 to 6 years old in Mathare and 148 in Buenaventura were included in the study. Both demonstrated good concurrent validity (Buenaventura ρ=0.49, p<0.0001; Mathare ρ=0.41, p<0.0001). Inter-rater reliability was found to be acceptable in Buenaventura (intraclass correlation [ICC]=0.69 [0.4-0.84]) and high in Mathare (0.87 [0.75-0.94]). As shown by its validation in diverse contexts, use in other populations may help improve the delivery of mental health care to children in crises and low-resource settings. Additional research on the design and delivery of intervention models for crises remains essential.

Young children's difficulties in switching from rhythm production to temporal interval production (>1 s).

This study examined the young children’s abilities to switch from rhythm production, with short inter-tap intervals (ITIs), to temporal interval production, with long ITI (>1 s), in a sensorimotor synchronization task. Children aged 3- and 5-year-olds were given six sessions of synchronization. In a control group, they had to synchronize their ITI to an inter-stimulus interval (ISI) of 4 s. In the experimental group, they must progressively increase their ITI for one session to the next (from 0.4 to 4.0-s ISI). Our results showed that the 5-year-olds produced longer ITI that the 3-year-olds in synchronization. However, the value of ITI in the 5-year-olds never exceeded 1.5 s, with more variable ITI in the control than in the experimental group. In addition, at 5 years, boys had more difficulties than girls in changing their tapping rhythm. These results suggest a temporal window in sensorimotor synchronization, beyond which the rhythm is lost and the synchronization becomes difficult.

Young children's difficulty with indirect speech acts: implications for questioning child witnesses.

Prior research suggests that infelicitous choice of questions can significantly underestimate children's actual abilities, independently of suggestiveness. One possibly difficult question type is indirect speech acts such as "Do you know..." questions (DYK, e.g., "Do you know where it happened?"). These questions directly ask if respondents know, while indirectly asking what respondents know. If respondents answer "yes," but fail to elaborate, they are either ignoring or failing to recognize the indirect question (known as pragmatic failure). Two studies examined the effect of indirect speech acts on maltreated and non-maltreated 2- to 7-year-olds' post-event interview responses. Children were read a story and later interviewed using DYK and Wh- questions. Additionally, children completed a series of executive functioning tasks. Both studies revealed that using DYK questions increased the chances of pragmatic failure, particularly for younger children and those with lower inhibitory control skills.

Relations between fine motor skill and parental report of attention in young children with neurofibromatosis type 1

Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is one of the most common genetic disorders presenting in approximately 1 in 3,500 live births. NF1 is a highly variable condition with a large number of complications. A common complication is neuropsychological problems, including developmental delays and learning difficulties that affect as many as 60% of patients. Research has suggested that school-aged children with NF1 often have poorer fine motor skills and are at greater risk for attention difficulties than the general population. Thirty-eight children with NF1 and 23 unaffected children between the ages of 4 and 6 years, who are enrolled in a study of early development in NF1, were included in the present study. Varying levels of fine motor functioning were examined (simple to complex fine motor tasks). For children with NF1, significant difficulties were demonstrated on lab-based mid-level and complex fine motor tasks, even after controlling for nonverbal reasoning abilities, but not on simple fine motor tasks. Parental report also indicated difficulties in everyday adaptive fine motor functioning. No significant correlations were found between complex fine motor ability and attention difficulties. This study provides much needed descriptive data on the early emergence of fine motor difficulties and attention difficulties in young children with NF1.

Use of parent report to screen for feeding difficulties in young children.

This study aimed to collect data on Australian children with regard to feeding difficulties using a standardised questionnaire, compare these data to international data collected using the same tool, assess the short-term reliability of this tool and determine the sensitivity and specificity of this tool in detecting feeding difficulties. Parents completed the Behavioral Pediatric Feeding Assessment Scale. Data on 54 typically developing children and 81 children with feeding difficulties aged 2-6 years are presented. Our Australian sample performed comparably to normative data from Canada and the UK. Reliable results were demonstrated over a 2-week period, and the scale was shown to have high specificity. There was a significant difference between typically developing children and children with feeding difficulties in frequency of undesirable mealtime behaviours (P < 0.01) and the number of behaviours reported as a problem by parents using this tool (P < 0.01). This study confirmed that the Behavioral Pediatric Feeding Assessment Scale is a valid tool for identifying Australian children with feeding difficulties. Given that it is simple to administer and has a high reliability and specificity, it is suggested as a useful screening tool for physicians working with young children. Data collected using this tool found that typically developing children display few undesirable feeding behaviours, and few behaviours are perceived as problems by parents. Therefore, any child presenting with a large number of feeding problems on this parent-reported measure should be referred for further multidisciplinary evaluation and treatment as required.

Hassle Free Mealtimes Triple P: A randomised controlled trial of a brief parenting group for childhood mealtime difficulties

Mealtime difficulties are common in typically developing young children. Easily accessible, wide-reaching, early intervention is needed to meet demand for assistance, and prevent the development of more serious feeding and psychosocial problems. Behavioural parent training is an efficacious intervention for childhood mealtime problems, however, existing programmes are long, intensive, and costly. The current study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of a brief parenting discussion group for young children's mealtime difficulties. Eighty-six parents of 2- to 5-year-old children with mealtime difficulties participated in a randomised controlled trial of Hassle Free Mealtimes Triple P (HFMTP; Morawska & Sanders, 2012), a 2-h discussion group on positive parenting strategies specific to the mealtime context. Results of parent-report measures showed that after intervention, there were significant improvements with large effect sizes in children's mealtime behaviour, parents' mealtime practices and cognitions, and both mealtime and general parenting confidence, compared to a waitlist control group. Parents also reported high satisfaction with the programme and effects were maintained at 6-month follow-up. These results support the efficacy of a brief parenting discussion group for childhood mealtime difficulties. This low intensity format of intervention has the potential to meet the high demand for assistance with young children's mealtime difficulties.