Young Children's Everyday Research Articles

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.

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.

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.

Applying developmental science concepts to improve the applicability of children’s food preference learning research

AbstractIn many nations today, the quality of children's diets is low, with numerous children rejecting healthy foods. Fortunately, young children can learn to like and consume new and previously rejected foods with experience, as evidenced by extensive experimental research. In this article, we propose integrating research on children's food preference learning with concepts from developmental science to facilitate generalizability across a wider range of children's characteristics and environments. We review emerging research suggesting that increased consideration of individual differences in responsiveness to food preference learning strategies and ecological validity can facilitate dissemination of evidence‐based feeding strategies that fit various children's characteristics and contexts. We incorporate Gottlieb's theory of probabilistic epigenesis to illustrate the importance of considering both individual differences in constitutionally based characteristics and children's naturalistic eating environments since these continually act together to affect eating outcomes. Further research incorporating these factors can help a broader population of parents and caregivers encourage healthy eating in young children's everyday environments.

Nature's Role in Young Children's Everyday Science Learning: A Case Study

Nature's Role in Young Children's Everyday Science Learning: A Case Study

Situated collaboration and problem solving in young children's digital gameplay

AbstractCollaboration is an important aspect of social activity associated with young children's digital gameplay. Children organise their participation as they communicate with and support one another, through sharing knowledge and problem‐solving strategies, displaying their expertise, encouraging others and creatively exploring possibilities for collaborative game moves. Drawing on a social interactional perspective, we explore the situated and embodied practices of the young players aged 3–8 years. We present three video ethnographic case studies of young children's everyday peer interactions from three different settings and age groups: Australia (home), Norway (pre‐school) and Sweden (afterschool). Across these settings, the findings identify how children collaborate with one another to progress the game by using multiple strategies, including instructing each other, monitoring each other's actions and problem solving. In the process, collaborative peer culture was maintained and built as the players worked towards problem solutions that require taking each other's perspectives, and sharing digital devices and skills. This focus on children's situated language use and assemblage of multimodal resources shows their moment‐by‐moment collaborative action. These multimodal interactions create opportunities for peer and sibling learning without the presence of an adult. The collaborative activity was a strategic resource used by the children in their digital game playing. In capturing young children's own strategies, we highlight their agency in learning occurring through social interaction and gameplay.

Young Children's Everyday Civics

ABSTRACTCivic education for our youngest citizens faces two challenges if we want to imagine new possibilities. First, the field of social studies uses frames of analyzing citizenship education based on studies of older students. Second, predetermined adult ideas (and ideals) of what it means to act civically dominate our conceptions of civic education for young children. Drawing on data from a yearlong multivocal video-cued ethnography, this article argues that social studies needs to focus on the everyday, embodied ways that young children act civically. Using a vignette from a typical day, this article illustrates how young children's everyday relationships and interactions highlight a different vision of being civic—a more caring and relational idea of the common good. When we recognize young children's construction of a common good in their smaller, yet no less important, civic spaces of school, we can expand our notions of civic education.

Young children's everyday concepts of the internet: A platform for cyber‐safety education in the early years

AbstractYoung children from around the world are accessing the internet in ever increasing numbers. The rapid increase in internet activity by children aged 4–5 years in particular is due to the ease access enabled them by touchscreen internet‐enabled tablet technologies. With young children now online, often independently of adult supervision, the need for early childhood cyber‐safety education is becoming urgent. In this paper, we report the early findings from a project aimed at examining the development of cyber‐safety education for young children. We argue that cyber‐safety education for young children cannot be effectively developed without first considering young children's thinking about the internet. In this paper, we use Vygotsky's ideas about the development of mature concepts from the merging of everyday and scientific concepts. We identify the potential range of everyday concepts likely to form the basis of young children's thinking about the internet as a platform for cyber‐safety education in the early years.

Young children's enactments of human rights in early childhood education

ABSTRACTThis paper explores ways in which human rights become part of and affect young children's everyday practices in early childhood education and, more particularly, how very young children enact human rights in the preschool setting. The study is conducted in a Swedish preschool through observations of the everyday practices of a group of children aged between 1 and 3 years. With a child view based on human rights theory and childhood sociology, an action-based methodology for seeking children's perspective is used to analyse the observation data. Three rights areas are identified in which children frequently deal with human rights in their actions and where they enact a range of possible rights holder positions: ownership, influence and equal value. These rights areas, and the children's various enactments of the rights, are reflected against the preschool context as a co-constructor to the actions of the participants.

Researching Young Children's Everyday Uses of Technology in the Family Home

Studies of the everyday uses of technology in family homes have tended to overlook the role of children and, in particular, young children. A study that was framed by an ecocultural approach focusing on children’s play and learning with toys and technologies is used to illustrate some of the methodological challenges of conducting research with young children in the home. This theoretical framework enabled us to identify and develop a range of methods that illuminated the home’s unique mix of inhabitants, learning opportunities and resources and to investigate parents’ethnotheories, or cultural beliefs, that gave rise to the complex of practices, values and attitudes and their intersections with technology and support for learning in the home. This resulted in a better understanding of the role of technology in the lives of these 3- and 4-year-old children.

Parental perceptions of young children's information behavior related to free-time activities

This poster presents an exploration of parental perceptions of the everyday life information behaviors of children between 4 and 8 years of age. Twenty-three parents/caregivers completed a survey about their children's information behaviors related to their hobbies and interests. Findings indicate that young children exhibit a heavy reliance on interpersonal interactions for information seeking and information sharing, while information use is more likely to be an individual activity. Information behaviors were evident in children who engaged in a variety of free-time activities, though not all free-time activities resulted in reported engagement in information behaviors. The findings of this study indicate that children as young as 4 years of age engage in observable information behaviors related to their everyday free-time activities. Additional research is needed to better understand young children's everyday life information behaviors.

Talking theory of mind talk: young school-aged children's everyday conversation and understanding of mind and emotion

Links between young children's everyday use of mindful conversational skills and their success on laboratory tests of theory of mind understanding (ToM) were evaluated. Using published scales, teachers rated the conversational behavior and shyness of 129 children aged 60 to 101 months (M = 78·8 months) who were in their first years of primary school. The children also took batteries of first- and second-order false-belief tests along with tests of emotion understanding and general language ability. Correlational and regression analyses showed that performance on false-belief tests of ToM significantly predicted children's competence at reading others' minds in their everyday conversational interactions. Furthermore, these links transcended individual differences in language ability, shy personality, emotion understanding, and age. These findings augment and extend a growing body of evidence linking performance on laboratory ToM tests to socially competent real-world behavior.

The Longitudinal Association of Young Children's Everyday Routines to Sleep Duration

The Longitudinal Association of Young Children's Everyday Routines to Sleep Duration

Influences of parent and child negative emotionality on young children's everyday behaviors.

Negative emotionality is linked to unfavorable life outcomes, but studies have yet to examine negative emotionality of parents and children as predictors of children's problem behaviors and negative emotion word use in everyday life. This study used a novel naturalistic recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder to investigate the separate and interactive influences of parent and child negative emotionality on daily child behaviors in a sample of 35 preschool-aged children over two time points separated by 1 year. Fathers' negative emotionality predicted children's whining at Time 1; mothers' negative emotionality predicted children's negative emotion word use at Time 1 and increases in children's arguing/fighting from Time 1 to Time 2. Parents' ratings of child negative emotionality also were associated with increases in children's arguing/fighting from Time 1 to Time 2, and child negative emotionality moderated the association between mothers' negative emotionality and children's arguing/fighting. Further, children with mothers high in negative emotionality displayed higher levels of problem behaviors when their mothers self-reported low levels of positive emotional expressiveness and/or high levels of negative emotional expressiveness. These findings offer preliminary evidence linking parent and child negative emotionality to everyday child behaviors and suggest that emotional expressiveness may play a key role in moderating the links between maternal negative emotionality and child behavioral problems.

Single Mothers' Views of Young Children's Everyday Routines: A Focus Group Study

Consistent daily routines have been associated with children's well-being, but children of single parents are less likely to engage in regular family meals or bedtime routines. This study explored routines and the challenges of maintaining routines as experienced by single mothers with a preschool age (3–5) child. Four focus groups (N = 12) were conducted and qualitative content analysis was used. Mothers described routines as an integral part of their parenting role and a reflection of successful parenting but maintaining routines around bedtimes and mealtimes were major concerns. Difficulties managing their child's behavior and their own fatigue were major challenges but mothers described a wide range of helpful strategies as well.

Contemporary perspectives on mathematics in early childhood education

Introduction: Trends in Early Childhood Mathematics Research, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. History of Mathematics in Early Childhood Education, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. Rethinking the Starting Point for Mathematics Learning, Catherine Sophian. Knowing the Mathematics in Early Childhood Mathematics, Herbert P. Ginsburg and Barbrina Ertle. Mathematics in Early Childhood, Julie Sarama and Douglas H. Clements. Mathematics Learning and Teaching in the Early Years, Ann Anderson, Jim Anderson, and Carolyn Thauberge. Development of Children's Mathematical Thinking in Early School Years, Jennifer M. Young-Loveridge. Development of Mathematical Reasoning among Young Children: How Do Children Understand Area and Length? William M. Bart, Masamichi Yuzawa, and Miki Yuzawa. The Impact of Method on Assessing Young Children's Everyday Mathematical Experiences, Jonathan Tudge, LinLin Li, and Tiffany Kinney Stanley. An Examination of the Role of Statistical Investigation in Supporting the Development of Young Children's Statistical Reasoning, Aisley Leavy. Research on Spatial Skills and Block Building in Girls and Boys: The Relationship to Later Mathematics Learning, Joanne Kersh, Beth M. Casey, and Jessica Mercer Young. Sociocultural Influences on Young Children's Mathematical Knowledge, Prentice Starkey and Alice Klein. Parental Guidance of Numeracy Development in Early Childhood, Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler. Do Parents Count?: The Socialization of Children's Numeracy, Joann P. Benigno and Shari Ellis. Research Perspectives in Early Childhood Mathematics, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. About the Contributors.

A Window Into Different Cultural Worlds: Young Children's Everyday Activities in the United States, Brazil, and Kenya

A powerful means to understand young children's normative development in context is to examine their everyday activities. The daily activities of 79 children (3 years old) were observed, for 20 hr each, in their usual settings. Children were selected from 4 cultural groups: European American and African American (Greensboro, United States), Luo (Kisumu, Kenya), and European descent (Porto Alegre, Brazil), evenly divided by social class. Examining children's naturally occurring engagement in school-relevant activities, both in and out of child care, revealed the importance of ecological context. The variation in activities was not explainable simply by cultural group (including race within the United States) or social class, but by the intersection of culture and class. The developmental implications of these findings are discussed.

Understanding Gender Differences in Context: Implications for Young Children's Everyday Lives

This article reviews recent UK‐based research that has prioritised children's accounts of their experiences of their daily lives, and focuses on gender differences in these accounts of family life, friendships, use of public space, use of out‐of‐school care, popular culture and consumption, and children's views of gender differences—drawing mainly from research with children in middle childhood. It then discusses some of the implications for practice and training for a range of professionals working with children. The article suggests that a re‐evaluation of theories of gender differences in practitioner textbooks could usefully be undertaken to integrate more sophisticated, contextual notions of gender identities based on children's experiences. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s).

Parents' and practitioners' perspectives of young children's everyday natural learning environments.

Parents' views of natural learning environments were compared to those of practitioners having either considerable or little experience with the characteristics of everyday natural learning opportunities. 8 experienced practitioners' views were congruent with those of the parents, whereas the 8 inexperienced practitioners' views were incongruent with those of both parents and their experienced peers.