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This study coordinates moral value development in adolescence, parenting style, and gender with issues of stability and specificity. The primary research question asked whether parenting styles of mothers and fathers influence the development of adolescent moral values, and secondary research questions asked whether adolescent moral values were stable and whether gender moderated predictive relations of parenting styles and adolescent moral values. At 14 and 18 years, a sample of 246 adolescents completed the Sociomoral Reflection Objective Measure -- Short Form; at 14 years, mothers and fathers self-reported their parenting styles using the Parental Authority Questionnaire. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses established a 2-factor model of adolescent moral values across the two ages: Life and Social Contract captured prosocial aspects of morality that are left to individual choice, and Law and Social Order captured acts that are legally or morally obligatory for individuals to perform. Structural equation modeling investigated relations between parental parenting styles and the two adolescent moral value factors, with adolescent age, gender, and family SES as covariates. Both moral values factors had high stabilities across the 4-year period. Mothers' authoritarian parenting at 14 years, but not their authoritative or permissive parenting, negatively predicted Life and Social Contract moral values, but not Law and Social Order, in adolescents at 18 years, more so for boys. Fathers' parenting styles did not predict adolescents' moral values at 18 years. Girls and adolescents from higher-SES families had higher Life and Social Contract moral values at 14 years; boys experienced more increases in Life and Social Contract moral values from 14 to 18 years than girls. Stability and parental predictive validity of moral values for adolescence are discussed.

Play during childhood is essential to growth and learning. Little is known about whether categories of toys moderate play behaviors at different ages, or how children interact with toys that are simple, appropriate, or complex for their developmental level. Two hundred and forty-three children between the ages of 1 and 8 years, divided into four age groups, played with toys that were targeted to their age group as well as toys aimed at one age group younger and older. Toys fell into nine different categories. Whether children fully utilized each toy was evaluated. Analyses examined how children's utilization of toys was affected by the age-appropriateness of the toy, the category of toy, and the child's age. Considering all age groups and toys, children were less likely to fully utilize toys targeted toward older children than age-appropriate toys, but this effect was moderated by the toy category and the child's age.

The transaction of children's core language skill and their home learning environment was assessed across 5 waves from infancy (15 months) up to adolescence (11 years) in 1,751 low-socioeconomic status families. Child core language skill and the quality of the home learning environment were each stable across waves, and the two covaried at each wave. Over and above these stabilities and concurrent correlations, and net child social competence and maternal education, higher quality stimulation and support in the home learning environment at each wave advanced children's core language skill at each subsequent wave, and reciprocally children with more advanced core language skill at each wave stimulated a higher quality home learning environment at each subsequent wave. These transactions were robust across child gender, ethnicity, birth order, and developmental risk. This bidirectionality shows that children consistently affect their environments from infancy to adolescence and underscores that the home learning environment is a worthy intervention target for improving core language skill in children regardless of age.

In a cross-society comparison, we assessed the state of mothers' knowledge of child-rearing and child development. The study included 1,077 mothers from five countries on four continents: Argentina, Belgium, Italy, South Korea, and the United States (U.S.) A criteria-referenced instrument, the Knowledge of Infant Development Inventory, was used to assess parenting knowledge after being adapted for cross-society comparison using item response theory and the alignment optimization approach for testing between-sample measurement invariance. Levels of mothers' parenting knowledge varied across the five societies and were associated with different sociodemographic factors and personal and nonpersonal supports. [This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH/NICHD, USA, and an International Research Fellowship in collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, UK, funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no 695300-HKADeC-ERC-2015-AdG).]

Retrospective parental reports are common in the developmental science literature, but their validity has been questioned. We investigated the consistency of retrospective maternal recall by comparing original with retrospective maternal reports in three domains (maternal cognitions, mother-reported child and mother behaviors, and observed child and mother behaviors) at three retention intervals (12, 14, and 15 years) in two metrics (individual standing and group level). In a longitudinal study, European American mothers (N = 46) provided data when their children were 5, 20, and 48 months of age and retrospective recall data for each age when their children were 16 years. Overall, mothers recalled similar average mean levels (49% of variables explored) or better mean levels (41% of variables) retrospectively; better levels indicating a positive recollection bias. At least moderate consistency in relative standing was evident for 52% of variables. However, the findings varied somewhat by domain, child age, and person. Retrospective parental reports can provide accurate accounts of the past, but should be used with caution, as their consistency varies and is specific to moderating factors.

This study examined children's mothers', fathers' and other caregivers' socioemotional parenting practices in 159,959 families with 3- to 4-year-olds from 51 low-and-middle income countries. Mothers engaged in the most socioemotional caregiving practices, followed by other caregivers and then fathers. The more socioemotional caregiving practices mothers engaged in, the more fathers engaged in, but the fewer other caregivers engaged in. The higher the level of national development, the more likely it is that mothers and fathers, but the less likely it is that other caregivers, engaged in socioemotional caregiving practices. Nations with mothers who engaged in more socioemotional caregiving practices had children who demonstrated more advanced development. At the within-country level, the more that all three caregivers engaged in socioemotional caregiving practices, the greater was children's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complexity is one of the major demands of adolescents' future life as adults. To investigate adolescents' competence development in applying problem-solving strategies in complex environments, we conducted a 2-wave longitudinal study in a sample of Finnish adolescents (11-17 years old; N = 1,959 at Time 1 and N = 1,690 at Time 2, 3 years later). In this study, we aimed to: (a) determine the optimal number of strategy use profiles while solving complex problems, (b) determine the number of meaningful developmental paths for each profile, and (c) test the impact of reasoning abilities and learning-related motivational beliefs on the probability that an adolescent with a given strategy use profile will take a given developmental path. Using latent transition analysis, we found 4 meaningful strategy use profiles: "Proficient Explorers," "Rapid Learners," "Emerging Explorers," and "Low-Performing Explorers." Forty-three percent of the participants were classified as having the same strategy use profile in Time 1 and Time 2. The strategy use of 34% was assessed as having improved between Time 1 and Time 2, while that of 21% was assessed as having declined between Time 1 and Time 2. Verbal reasoning ability and learning-related motivational beliefs predicted whether the developmental path of "Emerging Explorers'" was more likely to remain stable, improve, or decline over time.

Despite the robust link between dispositional optimism and well-being across the lifespan, the developmental origins of dispositional optimism are unknown. Understanding the pathways that lead to greater optimism during the transition from adolescence into young adulthood may be important given that this stage of the life course involves the navigation of multiple simultaneous psychosocial demands. Maternal attachment security may contribute to greater optimism by promoting perceptions of internal control. Participants were 218 European American children (98 females; 120 males), who completed self-report measures across four waves. A path analysis tested the associations between maternal attachment security (ages 10 and 14), locus of control (age 14), dispositional optimism (ages 18 and 23), and psychological well-being (age 23). Tests of indirect effects showed that greater perceptions of internal control at age 14 mediated the association between age 10 maternal attachment security and age 18 dispositional optimism. Age 18 dispositional optimism mediated associations between age 14 internal control and age 23 psychological well-being. Maternal attachment security may promote dispositional optimism through a greater internal locus of control in adolescence. Given that optimism promotes well-being throughout the lifespan, identifying the pathways through which optimism develops may contribute to understanding how to promote well-being.

Promoting children's prosocial behavior is a goal for parents, healthcare professionals, and nations. Does positive parenting promote later child prosocial behavior, or do children who are more prosocial elicit more positive parenting later, or both? Relations between parenting and prosocial behavior have to date been studied only in a narrow band of countries, mostly with mothers and not fathers, and child gender has infrequently been explored as a moderator of parenting-prosocial relations. This cross-national study uses 1,178 families (mothers, fathers, and children) from 9 countries to explore developmental transactions between parental acceptance-rejection and girls' and boys' prosocial behavior across 3 waves (child ages 9 to 12). Controlling for stability across waves, within-wave relations, and parental age and education, higher parental acceptance predicted increased child prosocial behavior from age 9 to 10 and from age 10 to 12. Higher age 9 child prosocial behavior also predicted increased parental acceptance from age 9 to 10. These transactional paths were invariant across 9 countries, mothers and fathers, and girls and boys. Parental acceptance increases child prosocial behaviors later, but child prosocial behaviors are not effective at increasing parental acceptance in the transition to adolescence. This study identifies widely applicable socialization processes across countries, mothers and fathers, and girls and boys. [Action editor by Cleopatra Howard Caldwell.]

Background: Most studies of the effects of parental religiousness on parenting and child development focus on a particular religion or cultural group, which limits generalizations that can be made about the effects of parental religiousness on family life. Methods: We assessed the associations among parental religiousness, parenting, and children's adjustment in a 3-year longitudinal investigation of 1,198 families from nine countries. We included four religions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, and Islam) plus unaffiliated parents, two positive (efficacy and warmth) and two negative (control and rejection) parenting practices, and two positive (social competence and school performance) and two negative (internalizing and externalizing) child outcomes. Parents and children were informants. Results: Greater parent religiousness had both positive and negative associations with parenting and child adjustment. Greater parent religiousness when children were age 8 was associated with higher parental efficacy at age 9 and, in turn, children's better social competence and school performance and fewer child internalizing and externalizing problems at age 10. However, greater parent religiousness at age 8 was also associated with more parental control at age 9, which in turn was associated with more child internalizing and externalizing problems at age 10. Parental warmth and rejection had inconsistent relations with parental religiousness and child outcomes depending on the informant. With a few exceptions, similar patterns of results held for all four religions and the unaffiliated, nine sites, mothers and fathers, girls and boys, and controlling for demographic covariates. Conclusions: Parents and children agree that parental religiousness is associated with more controlling parenting and, in turn, increased child problem behaviors. However, children see religiousness as related to parental rejection, whereas parents see religiousness as related to parental efficacy and warmth, which have different associations with child functioning. Studying both parent and child views of religiousness and parenting are important to understand the effects of parental religiousness on parents and children.

Many studies have addressed the question of the relative dominance of nouns over verbs in the productive vocabularies of children in the second year of life. Surprisingly, cross-class (noun-to-verb and verb-to-noun) relations between these two lexical categories have seldom been investigated. The present longitudinal study employed observational and parent-report data obtained from thirty mother-child dyads at 1;4, 1;8, and 2;0 to examine this issue. Both the Natural Partitions/Relational Relativity (NP/RR) hypothesis and the Emergentist Coalition Model (ECM) predict that having an initial repertoire of common nouns should facilitate the acquisition of novel verbs, whereas only the ECM suggests that children exploit the syntactic and semantic constraints of known verbs to infer the meaning of novel nouns. In line with the ECM, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that the percentages of nouns produced by children at 1;4 predicted later verbs at 1;8, whereas the percentages of verbs produced at 1;8 predicted later nouns at 2;0.

Background: Command of language is a fundamental skill, a cornerstone of multiple cognitive and socioemotional aspects of development, and a necessary ingredient of successful adjustment and functioning in society. Little is known about the developmental stability of language in at-risk youth or which biological and social risk factors moderate stability. Methods: This four-wave 10-year prospective longitudinal study evaluated stability of core language skill in 1,780 children in varying categories of biological and social risk in a multiage, multidomain, multimeasure, and multireporter framework. Results: Structural equation modeling supported loadings of diverse age-appropriate measures of child language on single latent variables of core language skill at 15 and 25 months and 5 and 11 years, respectively. Core language skill was stable over the first decade of life; significant and comparable stability coefficients were obtained for children with diverse biological and social risks, including poor health, welfare status, teen motherhood, ethnicity, gender, birth order, and families that changed in income and maternal education over the study period; stability in language was strong even accounting for child nonverbal intelligence and social competence, maternal education and language, and the family home environment. Conclusions: Core language skill varies in stability with age but is robustly stable in children regardless of multiple biological and social risk factors.