How do only children differ from other children?

Developmental outcomes of only and non-only children, categorized by birth order and by family size, were investigated. Multiple hypotheses based on meta-analyses of the only-child literature (Falbo & Polit, 1986) were tested with independent comparison techniques. Results indicated that developmental outcomes of only children were similar to outcomes for firstborns and children from two-child families but dissimilar to outcomes for later borns and children from larger families. Furthermore, outcomes were more positive for only children, firstborns, and children from two-child families than for all other comparison groups. In agreement with Falbo and Polit, only-child deprivation and only-child uniqueness explanations for outcome differences were not supported in favor of an explanation that emphasizes qualities of the parent-child relationship. Results suggest that future comparisons to only-child outcomes should preserve the independence of contrast results and expand the only-child category to include data from firstborns and others from two-child families.     

Taking a children’s rights perspective on children’s spirituality

Abstract

The right to spiritual development has had little attention in public educational policy. This is more challenging, considering the fact of increasing religious diversity and the focus on spirituality and religion in that context, as well as the way the spiritual is mentioned in documents on children’s rights. This article traces the development from the first documents on the rights of the child and responses to these documents. It is argued that educational policy and practice should pay more attention to the way children’s spirituality is included in the documents. This is an issue of general education as well as of moral philosophy. The article concludes with a claim: spiritual development is a matter of survival and flourishing as human beings, and considering this in the framework of children’s rights could mean exploring spiritual sources in one’s own faith as well as in other faiths.     

Do children "DRM" like adults? False memory production in children

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was used to investigate developmental trends in accurate and false memory production. In Experiment 1, DRM lists adjusted to be more consistent with children's vocabulary were used with 2nd graders, 8th graders, and college students. Accurate and false recall and recognition increased with age, but semantic information appeared to be available to all age groups. Experiment 2 created a set of child-generated lists based on the free associations by a group of 3rd graders to critical items. The child-generated associates were different from those generated by adults; long and short versions of the child-generated lists were therefore presented to 2nd, 5th, and 8th graders and college students in Experiment 3. Second graders exhibited few false memories, whereas 5th graders were similar to adults in low-demand conditions and more similar to younger children in high-demand conditions. Findings are discussed in terms of developmental changes in automatic and effortful processing and the use of semantic networks.     

Are children reliable reporters?

Fifty children, ranging in age from 6 to 16 years, and their mothers were interviewed using the same structured interview, which in its content follows the usual psychiatric examination of a child. Their answers were compared and it was found that there was an 80% average agreement on all questions. The agreement (between child and parent) was highest on questions relating to factual information (84%) and the agreement (between child's interviewer and parent) was lowest in the section dealing with mental status (69%). Girls were more reliable informants than boys.     

Can children recognize pride?

Recent research has shown that pride, like the "basic" emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, has a distinct, nonverbal expression that can be recognized by adults (J. L. Tracy & R. W. Robins, 2004b). In 2 experiments, the authors examined whether young children can identify the pride expression and distinguish it from expressions of happiness and surprise. Results suggest that (a) children can recognize pride at above-chance levels by age 4 years; (b) children recognize pride as well as they recognize happiness; (c) pride recognition, like happiness and surprise recognition, improves from age 3 to 7 years; and (d) children's ability to recognize pride cannot be accounted for by the use of a process of elimination (i.e., an exclusion rule) to identify an unknown entity. These findings have implications for the development of emotion recognition and children's ability to perceive and communicate pride.     

Young children and spirituality: understanding children’s connectedness in a group music class

In a fast-paced materialistic world, it is important to create opportunities for spirituality in early childhood music education, a developmental element often neglected in the scholarly literature. The purpose of the present hermeneutic phenomenological study is to understand the meanings that children ascribe to their experiences of connectedness in a group music class for 15 children, aged 4–5 years, at a nursery school in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Data were collected by means of interviews, close observations, diaries and drawings. In a qualitative data analysis, the following themes emerged regarding the children’s experiences in the music class: Music is the best; My body dances; Music takes me places; We can play together; You and me; I feel better and You can have mine. Music group classes in early childhood education could be useful in creating opportunities for spiritual experiences, promoting connectedness and consequently fostering children’s spiritual well-being.     

Do children understand fraction addition?

Many children fail to master fraction arithmetic even after years of instruction. A recent theory of fraction arithmetic (Braithwaite, Pyke, & Siegler, 2017) hypothesized that this poor learning of fraction arithmetic procedures reflects poor conceptual understanding of them. To test this hypothesis, we performed three experiments examining fourth to eighth graders' estimates of fraction sums. We found that roughly half of estimates of sums were smaller than the same child's estimate of one of the two addends in the problem. Moreover, children's estimates of fraction sums were no more accurate than if they had estimated each sum as the average of the smallest and largest possible response. This weak performance could not be attributed to poor mastery of arithmetic procedures, poor knowledge of individual fraction magnitudes, or general inability to estimate sums. These results suggest that a major source of difficulty in this domain is that many children's learning of fraction arithmetic procedures develops unconstrained by conceptual understanding of the procedures. Implications for education are discussed.     

Are children more accurate than adults? Spontaneous use of metaphor by children and adults

This study examined an observation in which children outscored adults on a series of test questions, which included unusual items such as, "Do you see with your ears?" We assumed that the adults were treating the questions metaphorically because the literally correct answer was so obvious, an assumption consistent with Grice's theory. In Study 1, we tested this assumption by manipulating pretest and test items so as to suggest, or not suggest, a metaphorical or factual response. In Study 2, we used a similar manipulation involving the order of questions of various sorts and we more directly tested the Gricean hypothesis by giving college students a reason to treat the question literally. The results replicated the previous finding in which college students' scores were lower than those of children, and the condition effects suggested that the college students' performance was due to their responding metaphorically.     

Happiness begets children? Evidence for a bi-directional link between well-being and number of children

The purpose of the current research was to examine the association between different facets of well-being and parenthood status. Specifically, using two longitudinal data sets, the present research explored whether individuals who possess high cognitive (Studies 1 & 2), emotional, and psychological well-being (Study 2) are more likely to subsequently become parents compared to their less happy counterparts. The results of both studies demonstrated that well-being at Time 1 positively predicted number of children at Time 2, controlling for a number of relevant variables (e.g. income, age). Additional analyses revealed that the relationship between cognitive well-being and subsequently having children was particularly strong for people who did not have any children previously. Potential mechanisms explaining how and why well-being may influence parenthood are discussed.     

Why do children confuse mirror-image obliques?

Thirty-five children aged from 4.17 to 6.58 years were given a delayed-matching task in which they had to choose on each trial which of two lines was the same as a previously displayed standard line. Their choices were no better than random when the lines differed in degree of slope but not in left-right orientation and were only marginally more accurate when the lines were left-right mirror images. Performance improved significantly when the lines differed both in degree of slope from the vertical and in left-right orientation and improved still further if at least one of the lines was horizontal or vertical. The results suggest that young children have extreme difficulty encoding in memory either the degree of slope or the left-right orientation of an oblique line.     

Is there stimulant sensitivity in children?

It has been suggested that exposure to stimulants alters the dopamine system and thus enhances sensitivity to stimulants and possibly other drugs. Sensitization has been induced experimentally in animals, especially in rats, and has been shown to be long-lasting. In addition, cross-sensitization across different compounds has been demonstrated. The animal data have raised concern that exposure to methylphenidate in childhood may enhance the risk for later abuse of stimulants and other drugs. We review the evidence bearing on sensitization in children treated with stimulants and followed into adulthood. None of four clinic-based studies found an excess of drug abuse in children previously treated with stimulants. A school-based longitudinal study obtained a relationship between early stimulant treatment and later drug use, without controlling for dinical confounds. The single prospective-controlled study of children who received placebo or methylphenidate does not support the sensitization hypothesis.     

Tomboys and sissies: Androgynous children?

Psychological studies of masculinity-femininity in children have paralleled those done with adults, which often consider deviations from masculinity for males and femininity for females as abnormal and perhaps pathological. Children who demonstrate cross-sex behaviors, however, may become androgynous adults whose cross-sex behaviors mean flexibility, not pathology. This study had two purposes: (1) to identify potentially androgynous children as those labeled by their peers as tomboys and sissies; (2) to compare personality characteristics of androgynous children with those of peers. Subjects were 312 elementary school children in a midwestern city. Results indicate that the labels tomboy and sissy are not necessarily indicators of androgynous children, but important social behaviors are related to the labels. For males, the possibility of frustrated creativity was raised.     

What causes scale errors in children?

A recent article by DeLoache et al. has documented an intriguing phenomenon in the development of action planning in young children. When children act on toy replicas of larger objects they make scale errors that are consistent with the full-sized object. Although the actions selected are inappropriate, their execution accurately takes into account the true size of the target. This phenomenon permits tests of the predictions of the perception-action and planning-control models of vision for action.     

Color-object interference in young children: A Stroop effect in children 3½-6½ years old

The Stroop color–word task cannot be administered to children who are unable to read. However, our color–object Stroop task can. One hundred and sixty-eight children of 3½–6½ years (50% female; 24 children at each 6-month interval) were shown line drawings of familiar objects in a color that was congruent (e.g., an orange carrot), incongruent (e.g., a green carrot), or neutral (for objects having no canonical color [e.g., a red book]), and abstract shapes, each drawn in one of six colors. Half the children were asked to name the color in which each object was drawn, and half were to name each object. Children's predominant tendency was to say what the object was; when instructed to do otherwise they were slower and less accurate. Children were faster and more accurate at naming the color of a stimulus when the form could not be named (abstract shape) than when it could, even if in its canonical color. The heightened interference to color-naming versus object-naming was not due to lack of familiarity with color names or group differences: Children in the color condition were as fast and accurate at naming the colors of abstract shapes as were children in the form condition at naming familiar objects.     

Adults' beliefs about children and mathematics: how important is it and how do children learn about it?

A series of studies was conducted which focused on US adults' beliefs about the relative importance of acquiring mathematical skills for preschool children and about how children acquire these skills. In Study 1, adults rated general information, reading and social skills as all being more important than mathematical skills. They also claimed that parents have the most influence on preschool children's learning regardless of content area. In Study 2, the parents of kindergarten children also rated reading, general information and social skills as all being more important than mathematics in preparing children for the first grade. The more important parents felt mathematics were, the more they reported engaging in a variety of mathematical-related activities with their children. However, the importance they placed on mathematics was not related to their child's actual mathematical performance. In summary, adults seem to value mathematics less than other skills in preparing young children to enter elementary school. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.