We study the relationship between harsh parenting strategies, including psychological and physical aggressions that do not constitute abuse, on early childhood cognitive and socio-emotional development. We estimate a value-added model that controls for a rich set of child, mother, and family characteristics, from a nationally representative sample of Chilean children aged 52-83 months. We find harsh parenting is significantly associated with lower verbal skills (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) of a magnitude of 0.06 standard deviations, and with increased behavioral problems (Child Behavior Check List), by 0.11 standard deviations, including internalization, externalization, and sleep problems. We also find that the more systematic (persistent) harsh parenting is, the stronger the association; the association is similar for boys and girls; reaches its peak at about 5 years of age; and it is stronger for children with less educated mothers.

We often think that either we are being patient or we have completely lost it. Whether we are at the kitchen table, in the office, or stuck in traffic, it's hard to appreciate that there is often a sweet spot directly in between, a fleeting moment in which we can choose a direction, as long as we are present to notice the signs. This essay shares my personal experience with rediscovering patience and living in the moment as a mother to a young boy with severe attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and sensory challenges. It mixes my clinical experience as a therapist with my parenting world and all the "stuff" in between. I hope it offers some tips to readers and clinicians on how to pause and take it all in-in order to capture and live in the moment. It helps us find humor in the frustration and love in all the distractions that are thrown our way. Maybe this is exactly the place where we can find the middle ground of patience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Bullying among school-age children is a public health issue in the United States. Although research and policy recommendations emphasize parental responsibility for preventing and dealing with children's bullying involvement, either as victims or perpetrators, we know little about how parents' mental health is linked to children's bullying involvement. We examine three questions on the association between children's bullying involvement and maternal depressive symptoms: (a) Does children's bullying victimization or perpetration increase maternal depressive symptoms?; (b) Do maternal depressive symptoms increase the risk of children bullying or being bullied by other children?; and (c) Do both directions of the associations vary by maternal education level, a key indicator of parenting resources which may buffer the intergenerational stress proliferation? Using panel data from the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 963), we conduct cross-lagged structural equation models to examine bidirectional associations between children's bullying involvement as victims or perpetrators and maternal depressive symptoms across three years when children were third, fifth, and sixth graders in 2001, 2003, and 2004, respectively. Controlling for concurrent associations among children's bullying victimization, perpetration, and maternal depressive symptoms, children's bullying victimization in third grade increases depressive symptoms for mothers without college degrees in fifth grade, whereas children's bullying perpetration in third grade increases depressive symptoms for mothers with college degrees in fifth grade. Regardless of maternal education levels, maternal depressive symptoms in children's third and fifth grade years increase the odds of children bullying or being bullied by other children in subsequent years. These findings underscore the need to take parents' mental health into account to prevent or solve issues concerning children's bullying involvement.

Parenting directly affects the developmental and clinical outcomes of children. How parental personality relates to perceptual and cognitive mechanisms during early development is not clear. For parents with traits of the personality dimension schizotypy, would their infant display brain responses similar to those on the schizophrenia-spectrum? This study investigates whether maternal personality influences early social-cognitive awareness during the first 6 postnatal months. Schizotypy is a dimension of personality within the general population. If deficits contribute to the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders by influencing the development of symptom-like characteristics, they may be observable in neurotypical individuals with schizotypal characteristics. Parents and their infants were shown standardised positive and negative faces and event-related potential responses were assessed. It was hypothesised that the infants of schizotypic mothers would display differential Negative-central event-related potentials for the happy and fearful expressions when compared to infants of non-schizotypic mothers. Results support prior literature; indicating 6-month-old infants allocate more attentional resources to fearful when contrasted to happy faces. The adult cohort displays this same ability. In addition, schizotypic mothers displayed comparable amplitudes for both expressions in comparison to the control mothers who exhibited larger amplitudes towards the fearful compared to the happy expression. Infants of schizotypic mothers did not show a greater sensitivity to facial expressions at 6-months, but schizotypic mothers showed a generalised response towards facial expressions compared to the typical P600 response illustrated by the control mothers. The present study suggests that development in the higher cognitive domains, such as the allocation of attention to novel stimuli, are not affected at 6 months of age by maternal personality related to schizotypy when examined at the group level. Implications for personality development, maternal-infant interactions and cognitive neuroscience methodologies are discussed.

Only a small amount of studies have looked at the structural neural correlates of children's arithmetic. Furthermore, these studies mainly implemented voxel-based morphometry, which only takes the volume of regions into account, without looking at other structural properties. The current study aimed to contribute knowledge on which brain regions are important for children's arithmetic on a structural level, by not only implementing voxel-based morphometry, but also cortical complexity analyses, based on the fractal dimension index. This complexity measure describes a characteristic of surface shape. Data of 43 typically developing 9-10 year-olds were analyzed. All children were asked to take part in two test sessions: behavioral data collection and MRI data acquisition. For data analysis, mean values for volume and cortical complexity were estimated within regions of interest (ROIs) and extracted for further analysis. The selected ROIs were based on regions found to be related to children's mathematical abilities in previous research. Results point towards associations between arithmetic fluency and the volume of the right fusiform gyrus, as well as the cortical complexity of the left postcentral gyrus, right insular sulcus, and left lateral orbital sulcus. Remarkably, no significant associations were observed between the children's arithmetic fluency and the volume or cortical complexity of typically arithmetic-associated parietal regions, such as the superior parietal lobe, intraparietal sulcus, or angular gyrus. Accordingly, the current study highlights the importance of structural characteristics of brain regions other than these typically arithmetic-associated parietal regions for children's arithmetic fluency.