Parenting practices refer to directly observable specific behaviours that parents use to socialize their children (e.g. supervision with homework). There are two broad dimensions of parenting:Parental supportThis refers to the affective nature of the parent-child relationship. Behaviours involve showing involvement (1), acceptance (2), emotional availability (3), warmth (4) and responsivity (3). This is associated with positive child outcomes.Parental controlBehavioural control This refers to behaviours aimed at controlling, managing or regulating the child’s behaviour through enforcing demands and rules (1), disciplinary strategies (2), punishment (3) or supervisory functions (4). This is associated with positive child outcomes if not used excessively or not at all.Psychological controlThis refers to behaviours aimed at manipulating children’s thoughts, feelings and emotions. This is associated with negative child outcomes.It is possible that a combination of parenting practices impact child development rather than the practices or dimensions in isolation. Parenting style refers to a parent’s configuration of parenting dimensions and practices. Baumrind suggested three parenting styles:Authoritarian parenting styleThis refers to a parenting style where the parents try to shape, control and evaluate their children’s behaviour based on an absolute set of standards. Permissive parenting styleThis refers to a parenting style where the parents are warmer and more autonomy granting rather than controlling. Authoritative parenting styleThis refers to a parenting style which falls between authoritarian and permissive. Another typology of parenting styles was developed by Maccoby and Martin:Authoritative (i.e. high responsiveness, high demanding).Authoritarian (i.e. low responsiveness, high demanding).Indulgent (i.e. high responsiveness, low demanding).Neglectful (i.e. low responsiveness, low demanding).Authoritative...

Cognition is about 50% - 70% heritable at the population level. Heritability is maximized when people choose their own environments and experiences. Gene-environment correlation states that people with more similar genes experience more similar environments and vice versa. Transactional models state that early-life behaviours, driven by genetics, lead to a person selecting particular types of environments. These environments have a causal effect on cognition, leading to the notion that the original behaviours led to these experiences and this cognition (e.g. having higher IQ leads to environments where you can stimulate IQ, which leads to an even higher IQ). Traits such as intelligence, motivation and intellectual interest are important in selecting these environments. Genes are thus very important in selecting environments which, in turn, have large impact on cognition. This leads to a large estimate of heritability. The availability of environmental experiences is essential in choosing one’s own environment. Differences in heritability between groups could thus demonstrate important underlying developmental processes. Heritability differs along age/development and socioeconomic advantage. Heritability increases with age as people tend to select their own environments more and more. Children select experiences in line with their genetic predispositions and these experiences stimulate cognitive development. This means that the early genetic influences on cognition will become amplified. Another explanation for the increased heritability with age is that new genes become activated later in development (e.g. biological changes of puberty). There may be lower heritability in children with lower SES. This may be because people with lower SES have less freedom to choose the most enriching experiences which, in turn, lead to more heritability. SES disadvantage may not disrupt gene-environmental transactions in countries that ensure high quality...

Executive function (EF) refers to the psychological processes involved in the conscious control of thought and action. However, there are several possible definitions:Executive function corresponds to planning (1), decision making (2), judgement (3) and self-perception (4).Executive function corresponds to inhibitory control. Executive function refers to a cognitive module consisting of effector output elements involving inhibition, working memory and organisational strategies necessary to prepare a response (i.e. homunculus approach).It may be that executive function consists of separable but related constructs. It seems to consist of inhibition of prepotent responses (1), shifting between mental sets (i.e. flexibility) (2) and updating and monitoring of representations in working memory (3). However, by conducting a task which is aimed at a single construct of EF, it is unclear whether it taps into multiple component processes (e.g. does flexibility rely on inhibitory control or are they separate constructs). Executive function has several developmental characteristics:It emerges first in early development, around a year of age.It develop across a wide range of ages (e.g. important changes between 2 and 5 years; adult-like function around 12 years; some changes continuing into adulthood).Failures in executive function occur in different situations at different ages and this depends on the complexity of the situation.There are ‘hot’ aspects (e.g. ventral and medial parts of prefrontal cortex) and ‘cool’ aspects of executive function (e.g. lateral prefrontal cortex). Difficulties with executive function may be a consequence of perturbations of the epigenetic process.Different developmental disorders involve impairments in different aspects of EF.Luria states that the prefrontal cortex consists of interactive functional systems which involve the integration of subsystems. The subsystems have specific roles but cannot be...

Children and adolescents who are exposed to victimization face increased risk of diverse negative outcomes by early adulthood (e.g. psychopathology; lower educational and career attainment; inflammatory disease). It could lead to loneliness, which refers to psychological distress associated with perceived shortcomings in one’s social relationships. Individuals vary in their susceptibility to feeling lonely. The heritability of loneliness is 40%-50%.The evolutionary model of loneliness states that humans are motivated to seek social connection as it confers a sense of safety. Being victimized is a sign that one’s safety is compromised and this could elicit a feeling that one’s social network is deficient and not fulfilling the desired functions. Bullying has several characteristics:It takes place between peers of similar age.It is characterized by an imbalance of power in favour of the perpetrator.It takes place online or offline (i.e. cyberbullying).With cyberbullying, there is no physical location (1), the identity of the perpetrator may not be known (2) and it may continue even if the victim removes oneself from the situation (3). It is associated with greater loneliness and other emotional problems.Bullying may play an important role in the development of loneliness. Emotional maltreatment may disrupt the formation of secure attachments and this negatively shapes individuals’ perceptions of their relationships with others. This could have a negative effect on loneliness. Polyvictimization refers to the experience of multiple victimization of different types. This is a stronger predictor of negative outcomes. People that are victimized may be more lonely but it is also possible that more lonely people get victimized more often. This may be due to traits and negative stereotypes associated with loneliness (e.g. shyness). People who have been exposed to one form of severe victimization are lonelier than those who are not. People who...

Parent involvement in learning may be essential as parents provide the resources children depend on (1), children spend a substantial time outside of the school environment (2) and parents are a central relationship for children (3). Parental involvement refers to parents’ commitment of resources to children’s learning. There is a distinction between parental involvement at school and at home. School-based involvement includes practices that require parents making contact with the school (e.g. attending school meetings). Home-based involvement refers to parents’ practices related to learning that take place outside of school (e.g. assisting children with homework; talking about academic issues). Home- and school-based involvement may be connected. Parents’ expectations and values are not necessarily a sign of their commitment of resources to children’s learning. There is an association between expectations and values and children’s achievement and a link between parents’ involvement and children’s achievement. The magnitude of the association may depend on different forms of parental involvement. The association is not diminished when SES is taken into account. Parental practices can have negative effects (e.g. monitoring) or positive effects (e.g. direct assistance with homework). Parental involvement with homework may yield negative effects because this typically only occurs when a child experiences difficulty with achievement. However, parents tend to assist children who are having difficulty with homework and this improves how these children do in school. The more involved parents are, the more children benefit over time in terms of their achievement. Highly involved parents in their children’s learning also tend to engage in other parenting practices which are beneficial for children’s achievement (e.g. autonomy support). It is possible that the influence of parents’ involvement accumulates over time so that small effects become large....

Contrary to most animals, humans communicate cooperatively. Infants (i.e. 10 to 12 months) begin in cooperative communication through the pointing gesture. This form of communication relies on their social-cognitive ability to direct the attention of others and to understand the attention-directing intentions of others. Skills of intention-reading refer to social-cognitive abilities which are necessary to understand one’s intentions and which are foundational to all forms of human communication. Cognitive skills of pattern-finding refer to general cognitive processes of categorization, analogy, schema formation and distributional learning aimed at reconstructing the linguistic abstractions of a speech community to become productive and creative with the conventions of a language.One theory of language acquisition is that children have innate knowledge of language (e.g. Chomsky) and these innate grammar structures constrain language development. Constructivist theories state that children acquire competence with a language mainly through cultural learning and other cognitive processes (e.g. categorization; analogy). In constructivist theories, children are biologically prepared for language but only in general ways (e.g. capacities for cultural learning). An utterance refers to the smallest unit in which a person expresses a complete communicative intention (e.g. ‘give’). It is used to direct a recipient’s attention to something and to express a communicative motive (e.g. through an emotional expression). A child needs to understand the communicative intention of an utterance before the child can use it. Adults help this by stressing the word in a sentence. When a child does not understand the sub-functions of an utterance, the child will not be able to use it in different situations (e.g. novel situations). Children learn words by attempting to understand utterances. To understand utterances, children often need to determine the functional...

People do not have innate mechanisms for complex calculations (e.g. math). However, children typically do spontaneously come up with some form of counting without being explicitly taught. It may be that counting knowledge is innate but it is also possible that this develops through imitation and that children, while being able to count, do not know the meaning of these numbers. At three and a half years of age, children know that the order in which one recites numerals is crucial. Young children are able to point out subtle counting errors (e.g. count something twice) and by four years of age, children have mastered the basics of how to count. Children do not know the meaning of counting until the end of their fourth year. Children tend to come up with calculation algorithms without explicit instruction (e.g. adding numbers up using their fingers). Children initially have big difficulties in counting without their fingers and may explicitly state their process (i.e. name what they are doing), though this requires a lot of effort and concentration. The minimum strategy refers to starting an addition equation with the larger quantity and count a number of times equal to the smaller of the two numbers (e.g. 4 + 2 = four, five, six, six!). This strategy underlies most of children’s calculations before the onset of formal schooling. Children develop an intuitive understanding of commutativity (i.e. a+b=b+a) without any formal schooling. Between the ages of 4 and 7, children exhibit an intuitive understanding of what calculations mean and how they should best be selected.Young adults rarely solve addition and multiplication problems by counting but retrieve results from a memorized table. Accessing this table takes longer as the operands get larger. This may be due to the accuracy of mental representations dropping with number size (1), order of acquisition influencing memory (2) and the amount of drilling (i.e. less training with larger number...

It is not clear what through what processes peer rejection lead to internalizing problems and how the teacher can be a protective factor in this. School-age children who experience difficulties in their relationships with peers are at increased risk for psychopathology. Social self-concept act as a mechanism through which peer rejection influences the development of internalizing problems.The social self-concept refers to cognitive self-perceptions of one’s functioning in the social domain and this is negatively influenced by peer rejection. A poor self-concept is a cognitive vulnerability factor leading to the development of internalizing problems.Teacher-student relationships are predictive of internalizing problems and self-perceptions. Supportive teacher-student relationships may compensate for the negative effect of peer rejection on children’s self-concept. This means that good teacher-student relationships could be a protective factor against the negative effect of peer rejection on one’s social self-concept.Peer rejection predicts declines in social self-concept and this is negatively associated with internalizing problems. Impeded social self-concept is the mechanism through which peer rejection leads to internalizing problems. Disliked children may receive more negative treatment from peers and this negative feedback may be internalized over time. Individual teacher support may have a protective factor, though this is not clear. Medium-high to high levels of teacher support protected children’s social self-concept against peer rejection but only at the end of the second grade. This means that teacher support can at least buffer the effects of peer problems on children’s self-concept. However, teachers are not able to alleviate the full burden of peer rejection. It is possible that the link between maladaptive self-cognitions and internalizing outcomes becomes stronger with age as children’s cognitive abilities mature. ...

Early childhood adversity is common (i.e. 48% - 60%). Early life trauma impacts the developmental trajectory of children and health outcomes over the life course. No experiences with maltreatment and a non-depressed primary caregiver are associated with resilience. Adult health outcomes are influenced by the cumulative incidence of adverse life experiences. Differences in risk are influenced by chronicity (1), severity (2), contextual factors (3) an type of childhood traumas (4).Resilience refers to good mental and physical health despite early adverse life events. This means that it includes a ability to withstand, adapt to and recover from adversities. It may buffer a child from adversity by reducing the impact of trauma (1), reducing negative chain reactions stemming from trauma (2) and it may enable opportunities for recovery (3).Resilience results from the interplay between a child’s genetics (1), temperament (2), knowledge and skills (3), past experiences (4), social supports (5), cultural resources (6) and societal resources (7). High self-esteem (1), internal locus of control (2), external attributions of blame (3), optimism (4), determination in the face of adversity (5), cognitive flexibility (6), reappraisal ability (7), social competence (8) and the ability to face fears (9) are resilience factors. There are five modifiable resilience factors:Positive appraisal style and executive function skills (i.e. individual)A positive appraisal style refers to optimism and confidence in one’s ability to manage adversity. This is modifiable via experience and explicit CBT. Executive function is modifiable through educational approaches on narrow executive functions, computer training programmes on broad executive functions, aerobic exercise and mindfulness training. Executive function especially promotes resilience when it comes to cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control.Parenting (i.e. family)Responsive parenting and good parental...