This study leverages a randomized clinical trial to test whether intervention-related changes in cognitive and socioemotional parenting behaviors during mother-child reminiscing support children's self-regulation (emotion regulation [ER] and executive function [EF]) in middle childhood among families with and without maltreatment exposure. At baseline (T1), 248 children (36-86 months; 50.4% male; 39.7% Black, 25.9% White, 34.5% Latinx/other) and their mothers were enrolled. Half of maltreated families were randomized to Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) to enhance maternal reminiscing. Dyads were assessed postintervention and longitudinally 5 years later. RET had a significant indirect effect on child ER at the 5-year follow-up through postintervention maternal elaboration (β = 0.10, SE = 0.04, p = .008). Findings highlight the importance of maternal reminiscing for child self-regulation.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 racial awakening posed challenges to adolescents' academic functioning. Culturally relevant school supports are one potential source of resilience in the dual pandemic. This study examined whether heterogeneous culturally relevant school support profiles buffered declining grade point average (GPA) trajectories from 2019 to 2021 among sixth- and ninth-grade students in the U.S. Southwest (N = 717; Mage = 13.7; 49.9% girls; 31.8% Hispanic/Latinx, 31.5% Multiethnic, 25.7% White, 11.1% Black/African American, Asian American, American Indian, or AMENA). Ninth-grade students experiencing high general, moderate cultural, & critical support or low general, devoid cultural, & critical support had significantly better GPA trajectories than those experiencing moderate general & cultural, devoid critical support. Among sixth-grade students, no differences emerged. Discussion of these complex patterns focuses on implications for academic resilience after the dual pandemic.

Through statistical learning (SL), children implicitly extract repeated patterns in their environment. The developmental trajectory of how previously learned statistical information impacts children's subsequent learning is poorly understood. Furthermore, how SL contributes to other developmental processes, like executive function, has received surprisingly little attention. In an accelerated longitudinal design, we assessed 187 5- to 12-year-olds' (42.8% = female, 84.6% = White) SL and executive function capacities over 16 months. Cue-based SL and retention of nonadjacent probabilistic sequences were age-invariant. However, while all age groups showed an increased sensitivity to deterministic sequences with each successive time point, 5- to 6-year-olds demonstrated a greater longitudinal increase in sensitivity than older children. This finding suggests enhanced abilities to apply previously learned deterministic sequences to novel scenarios. Regarding SL-executive function links, two latent change score models provided limited evidence for SL-executive function coupling across the time points. While further work is needed to explore SL-executive function links across other modalities and in younger populations, our results suggest that early visual SL capacities may not be a primary driver of executive function change during middle childhood.

This study investigated the development of young children's normative stances and moral self-concept (MSC) over 1 year and their relations with sharing behavior. Five hundred children in Germany (approximately 5 years at T1, mostly White, 51% girls) were assessed at 3 measurement points. Latent profile and transition analyses identified 7 distinct profiles of normative stances-MSC: (1) low-moderate, (2) moderate-exceptionally low, (3) high-moderate, (4) moderate-low, (5) moderate-high, (6) moderate-moderate, and (7) moderate-exceptionally high. Only the low-moderate profile was found across all 3 measurement points. MSC increased over time, while normative stances remained stable or declined. Children who transitioned from high-moderate (T1) to moderate-low (T2) to moderate-moderate (T3) shared more at T3 than those who remained at low-moderate levels. Gender and socioeconomic differences were found, highlighting the role of individual and family characteristics on moral development. Overall, no consistent pattern was found between profiles and sharing behavior, emphasizing the complex nature of moral development and prosocial behavior in early childhood.

This multi-method, multi-informant, quasi-experimental study examines trajectories of child psychopathology over an 8-year period pre-and post-COVID-19 pandemic. We examined parenting as a moderator of the COVID-19 impact. Participants were 310 low-to-middle-income families from the United States with a target child followed over 6 waves (Wave 1, Mage = 2.97, SD = 0.38; 55.3% girls; 55.2% White, 21.3% African American, 16.2% mixed race; Wave 6: Mage = 9.32, SD = 0.76). Findings indicated that children exhibit significant linear growth and COVID-related growth above and beyond the linear growth in internalizing problems. Pre-COVID parenting moderated this effect, such that low paternal structure and consistency and low parental secure-base provision strengthened the association between COVID impact and the growth of internalizing problems, yielding greater increases under high impact and lower increases under low impact.

Emotion inference is not purely reactive but is supported by conceptual priors that contribute to active sampling of meaningful cues as social events unfold, yet how children learn to anticipate when and where such cues will emerge remains unclear. This study examined whether conceptual emotion knowledge serves as a prior supporting developmental increase in anticipatory attention, and whether such attention facilitates more adult-like emotion inferences. Children aged 5-11 years (N = 180, Mage = 8.02 years, 84 female; data collected 2024-2025) from China viewed videos while eye movements were simultaneously recorded and continuously rated the target character's emotion on a valence-arousal grid. Anticipatory attention was indexed by the extent to which children's saccades were directed toward regions about to contain meaningful information. Conceptual emotion knowledge was assessed with a composite that combined emotion granularity, diversity, and performance on a standardized emotion understanding test. Multilevel, moderated mediation models revealed that conceptual emotion knowledge mediated age-related increases in anticipatory saccades toward meaningful regions, which in turn predicted more adult-like emotion judgments. Together, these findings suggest that conceptual knowledge acts as a developmental mechanism bridging children's prior experience and growing attentional strategies, enabling more mature emotion understanding in social environments.

The development of audiovisual speech perception in tone-language-speaking children remains debated, and this study addressed this issue by examining Cantonese-speaking children, extending prior work on Mandarin speakers to a tone language with greater phonological complexity. Using the McGurk paradigm, 82 typically developing Cantonese-speaking children (42 girls, 40 boys; aged 4-11 years) and 21 adults (11 females, 10 males) from Hong Kong completed audiovisual speech perception tasks in quiet, moderate background noise (10 dB speech-to-noise ratio, SNR), and severe background noise (-10 dB SNR). Results showed developmental shifts in sensory dominance among Cantonese-speaking children around age 10: from relying mainly on auditory cues to integrating auditory and visual cues in quiet and 10 dB conditions, and from audiovisual-integrated to visual-dominant processing in the -10 dB condition. This developmental pattern aligns with the predictions of the Statistically Optimal Hypothesis. These findings also indicate that Cantonese-speaking children undergo this shift later than Mandarin-speaking peers, highlighting the adaptive nature of this developmental process.

This cluster randomized controlled trial evaluated a brief parenting program for recently settled immigrants in Sweden, focusing on improving parent-child relationships, parental efficacy in supporting schooling, resilience, optimism, societal belonging, and mental health. The four sessions, delivered in Arabic, Dari, and Somali, involved 92 parents in the intervention (13 clusters) and 40 in the control group (7 clusters, Mage = 42, 80% mothers). Participants were recruited between May 2023 and February 2025. Compared to the control group, intervention participants showed significant improvements in resilience (β = .17, p = .026) and efficacy in supporting their child's schooling (β = .42, p = .005). Those with greater initial challenges benefited more from the program. These findings underscore the program's potential to promote resilience and efficacy among recently settled immigrant families.

The study examined the transmission of Confucian-influenced gender role beliefs from Chinese American fathers to their adolescent sons, through fathers' parenting hostility and the cultural construct of shaming. Participants included fathers, mothers, and adolescents from Wave 2 (adolescent Mage = 17.04 years; 58% female and 42% male; collected in 2006) and Wave 3 (collected in 2010) of a study of 444 Chinese American families from the West Coast of the United States. Fathers' gender role beliefs indirectly predicted increases in male adolescents' beliefs from adolescence to emerging adulthood, through fathers' reports of hostility (b = .042, 95% CI = [0.001, 0.097]) and adolescents' reports of shaming (b = .038, 95% CI = [0.002, 0.090]). Gender socialization occurs through general parenting practices, and cultural measures are integral for understanding Chinese American male adolescents' gender development.

Learning to predict when events occur often requires inferring links between experiences. While children use knowledge of routines to retrospectively estimate event times, little is known about how structured temporal knowledge forms initially and develops. Here, a representative community sample (aged 7-25 years; n = 104; 53% female; 57% White; Austin, TX, USA) completed a memory task in which they could infer event times from temporal cues that varied across learning repetitions by linking and updating information across experiences. We found that while adults precisely located events in time through inference, younger participants' temporal estimates were biased toward average times, particularly when temporal cues were more variable. These findings suggest that developmental improvements in linking and updating information across multiple experiences underlie age-related gains in how children represent time.

Variation in how people use language provides powerful cues to social identity. As children join a language community, they must acquire such sociolinguistic knowledge. Prior work shows that children link broad language varieties to social groups, but little is known about whether they can use variation in specific language features to infer speakers' group membership. 40 English-speaking children aged 5-6 years (M = 72.2 months; Nfemale = 22, Nmale = 18; NWhite = 35, NAsian,White = 3, NBlack,White = 1; Nother = 1; all non-Hispanic) participated between October 2024 and August 2025 in a semi-artificial language learning study in which they were exposed to 2 alien groups that differed in plural marking. Children were then tested on their ability to determine which group new aliens belong to based solely on their plural usage. Children succeeded when the group-marker mappings were deterministic, but not when they were probabilistic. These findings suggest that young children use consistent morphosyntactic patterns to infer group membership and highlight a novel approach to studying sociolinguistic learning. Future research will extend this paradigm to include more realistic social categories that are meaningful to children.

Understanding place value (e.g., how digits represent tens, hundreds, and thousands) is a key foundation for children's later success in mathematics. However, many children struggle to fully grasp how the base-ten system works. Developmental trajectories can inform formative assessment and structure instruction of place value understanding. In this paper, the longitudinal validity of a hierarchical model of typical steps in children's development of place value understanding was challenged. Students' development of place value understanding was assessed during a longitudinal study across one school year (N = 195; 87 girls; Grades 3 and 4) at three measurement time points. Significant gains in place value understanding over the course of 1 year were found at the group and individual level. Individual development was visible in terms of raw scores as well as the level of place value understanding in terms of a development model. Whereas prior knowledge had no effect on the development of place value understanding, intelligence was positively associated with a steeper development. Individual developmental trajectories emphasize the heterogeneity of place value development. The results support the utility of the model as a developmental progression of place value understanding for guiding instruction and assessment.

This systematic review and meta-analysis provides the first comprehensive synthesis of research on emotion regulation (ER) in children and adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD), based on 16 independent samples (NDLD = 1,616; ages 5-16). Individuals with DLD showed significantly greater ER difficulties than typically developing peers, representing a medium effect size (g = 0.563). This effect remained statistically significant, although reduced to a small-to-medium effect size, in sensitivity analyses excluding studies from the same research group (g = 0.317). Informant discrepancies emerged, with teachers reporting more ER difficulties than parents and children's self-reports. No clear evidence of publication bias was observed on formal testing; however, converging evidence from small-study effects, risk of bias analyses, and publication year trends suggests that the observed effect size may represent an overestimate of the true effect. These findings underscore the need for more rigorous, theory-driven, multi-method research to accurately estimate the magnitude of ER difficulties in DLD.

Autonomy is a core developmental task of adolescence, shaped by daily parent-adolescent interactions involving need support and conflict. Guided by Self-Determination Theory, this study examined the bidirectional day-to-day associations between adolescents' perceived parental need support, conflict with parents, and autonomy. Using a daily diary design, this study employed a Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling on a sample of 286 Dutch adolescents (Mage = 11.60, SD = 0.47 at Wave 1), who were followed for one week in four measurement waves (28 days total). The results indicated that, at the within-person level, parental need support was positively associated with adolescent autonomy experiences (perceived choice and self-concept clarity) on the same day. Across days, parental need support and self-concept clarity showed bidirectional associations, such that increases in one predicted increases in the other the following day. In contrast, parental need support predicted next-day perceived choice, but not vice versa. Conflict with parents was negatively associated with autonomy on the same day, but showed no lagged effects. Together, these findings highlight the predictive role of parental need support in adolescents' daily autonomy experiences, and suggest that distinct facets of autonomy may display different temporal dynamics in their associations with parental need support.

Infants engage with a variety of objects in their environments that offer unique opportunities for action and learning. This study experimentally tested 3 hypotheses: (1) Different objects instigate different types of infant action, and (2) caregivers offer contingent verb input, such that (3) infants' actions temporally align with caregiver verb input. Thirty infant-mother dyads (12-22 month-old, 14 girls, 21 White, 4 Black, 2 Asian, 3 Hispanic, 3 Multiracial) played in two conditions-with gross-motor toys to incentivize locomotor play and fine-motor toys to incentivize stationary play. As hypothesized, infant locomotion and caregiver verb use differed by condition. Moreover, infants' in-the-moment locomotion temporally aligned with caregivers' verbs. Effects ranged from η2 = .416-.778. Findings provide experimental evidence that objects for play shape infant actions and caregiver verb input.