Toddlers' Attachment Security to Child-Care Providers: The Safe and Secure Scale

Attachment relationships of toddlers (N = 45) to their child-care providers were investigated. Children's behaviors with their mothers were observed at home at 24 months and with their child-care providers at 26 months. Attachment Q-Sort procedures were used at home (90 items) and in child care (78 items); the latter yielded a 15-item Safe and Secure Scale describing the safe haven and secure base functions of attachment relationships in child care—being able to (a) seek and receive positive attention, (b) feel safe and protected, (c) receive support for exploration, (d) receive consolation when distressed, and (e) seek and accept assistance. Independent observational measures of child-care quality also were obtained at 24 months. As hypothesized, the Safe and Secure Scale was related to proximal rather than distal indicators of child-care quality, and it was a stronger measure than the child-caregiver Q-security score that was based on all 78 items. Child-mother and child-caregiver security were significantly related.     

Emotion Regulation Strategies and Parenting Practices among Parents of Children With Clinic-Referred Conduct Problems

Objective. This study examined the cognitive-affective strategies used by parents of young children with conduct problems to regulate emotions. Key questions concerned the extent to which these emotion regulation strategies are associated with positive and negative parenting practices and predict quality of parenting through interplay with parental depression. Design. Participants were families of toddlers (n = 84) referred to a tertiary-level health service for the treatment of disruptive behavior problems. Parenting practices were indexed through observational coding of parent–child interactions and self-report data on multiple dimensions of positive and negative parenting. Parents self-reported their use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression—the two emotion regulation strategies that are most robustly associated with psychosocial functioning in adults. Results. Associations between emotion regulation strategy and quality of parenting were moderated by parental depressive symptom severity, with distinct effects seen for positive and negative parenting practices. In terms of positive parenting, more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal was associated with increased use of labeled praise among parents with lower levels of depressive symptoms, whereas parents who had higher levels of depressive symptoms engaged in less such praise regardless of how frequently they used reappraisal. In terms of negative parenting, frequent use of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression were associated with reduced levels of negative parenting, but only among parents with high levels of depression. Conclusions. These findings add to growing support for the integration of emotion regulation strategies into family process models of early-onset conduct problems and related clinical interventions.     

Child abuse potential inventory and parenting behavior: Relationships with high-risk correlates

The primary purpose of this research was to examine the construct validity of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory by comparing maltreating and high-risk parents' CAP Inventory abuse scores to their behavior during interactions with their children. A second purpose was to determine the degree to which CAP Inventory scores and parenting behavior were related to several known correlates of abuse, as measured by parent and teacher reports. Participants (n = 41) included abusive and high-risk parents and their children referred to a treatment group. Correlational analyses revealed that CAP Inventory scores and observed parenting style yielded highly related findings, supporting construct validity of the CAP Inventory. However, the CAP Inventory and observed behavior index showed a different pattern of relationships to the risk correlates. Implications for assessment of risk status are discussed and recommendations are provided for continued research.     

Focus-on-form instructional methods promote deaf college students' improvement in English grammar

Focus-on-form English teaching methods are designed to facilitate second-language learners' noticing of target language input, where "noticing" is an acquisitional prerequisite for the comprehension, processing, and eventual integration of new grammatical knowledge. While primarily designed for teaching hearing second-language learners, many focus-on-form methods lend themselves to visual presentation. This article reports the results of classroom research on the visually based implementation of focus-on-form methods with deaf college students learning English. Two of 3 groups of deaf students received focus-on-form instruction during a 10-week remedial grammar course; a third control group received grammatical instruction that did not involve focus-on-form methods. The 2 experimental groups exhibited significantly greater improvement in English grammatical knowledge relative to the control group. These results validate the efficacy of visually based focus-on-form English instruction for deaf students of English and set the stage for the continual search for innovative and effective English teaching methodologies.     

Commentary: the coalition for improving maternity services:

A consumer advocate, two childbirth educators, and a certified nurse-midwife each provide commentary on the effectiveness of and potential uses for the Evidence Basis for the Ten Steps of Mother-Friendly Care.     

Improbable or impossible? How children reason about the possibility of extraordinary events

The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, children frequently denied the possibility of events that adults judged improbable but not impossible. Three additional experiments varied the manner in which possibility judgments were elicited and confirmed the robustness of preschoolers' tendency to judge improbable events impossible. Overall, it is argued that children initially mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur for evidence that no such circumstances exist.     

Families Created by Egg Donation: Parent–Child Relationship Quality in Infancy

Increasing numbers of children are being born through egg donation and thus do not share a genetic relationship with their mother. Parent–infant relationship quality was examined in 85 egg donation families and a comparison group of 65 in vitro fertilization families (infant M = 11 months). Standardized interview and observational measures were used to assess mother–infant and father–infant relationship quality at the representational and behavioral levels. Few differences were found between family types in parents’ representations of the parent–infant relationship. Differences were found between family types in the observational assessment of mother–infant relationship quality, indicating less optimal interactions in egg donation families. Findings suggest that egg donation families function well in infancy overall, but there may be subtle yet meaningful differences in mother–infant interaction quality.     

Children's Developing Descriptions and Judgments of Pretending

Two studies investigated 4- to 7-year-olds’ knowledge about pretending. In Study 1, children (N = 66) defined pretending and described examples of own and others’ pretending. In Study 2, children (N = 52) defined pretending and then completed a battery of measures that examined their understanding that pretending involved mental states. In Study 1, older children articulated more defining features of pretending than younger children. When describing how they or others pretended, children focused on action or appearance, regardless of whether they had included more defining features in their definitions of pretending. In Study 2, the more defining features children articulated, the better their performance on the battery. We discuss the implications of these data for the role of pretending in children's developing theory of mind.     

The Arts and Open‐Mindedness

Open‐mindedness is typically considered an intellectual virtue that brings humans into (closer) contact with reality and its complexities. In this essay, Susan Verducci expands the ways we typically think of cultivating open‐mindedness in classrooms to include the practice of engagement with the visual and performing arts. Working with the arts allows students and teachers to perceive and embody realities they would not normally experience. Specifically, the arts enable the drawing forth and exploration of multiple and subjective interpretations; the arts can therefore be uniquely productive in opening minds by helping one negotiate human perceptual constraints, by providing opportunities to enter standpoints other than one's own, and by encouraging the practice of living with uncertainty and ambiguity.     

Validating the Emotion-Focused Interactions Scale for teacher–student interactions

Learning Environments Research - Teacher–student interactions contribute to the quality of the classroom environment. Although numerous measures of these interactions exist, few target the...