The following presents examples of recently published reports from both areas of the lab's work. Program I: Child and Family Development Across the First Three Decades Command of language is a cornerstone of development, and necessary for successful adjustment. This four-wave 10-year prospective longitudinal study evaluated stability of core language skill in 1780 children in varying categories of biological and social risk. Structural equation modeling supported loadings of diverse measures of child language on single latent variables of core language skill at 15 and 25 months and 5 and 11 years. 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. Separation from parents in adolescence is normative and a prerequisite for healthy functioning in adulthood, while adolescent detachment from parents, a radical and developmentally premature emotional distancing, is linked to unhealthy functioning in adulthood. Peer relationships may play a role in how adolescents separate and/or detach from their parents. Utilizing a latent variable approach, we examined how 14-year-old adolescents (N = 190) separation and detachment from mother related to adolescent peer relationships, and whether peer relationships moderated how separation and detachment related to adolescent internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Detachment from parents was associated with less positive peer relationships and more internalizing and externalizing problems. Positive peer relationships sharply attenuated relations between detachment and higher internalizing and externalizing problems. Healthy separation from parents was unrelated to peer relationships, internalizing, and externalizing. Our findings indicate that peers are an important but often unavailable resource for detached adolescents. Temperament in infancy defined as individual differences in attentional, motor, and emotional reactivity, is expected to remain relatively constant over development, although it can change in response to the environment. Two studies focused on the childs first year and considered infant age, gender, birth order, term status, and SES as moderators of temperament stability. Study 1 consisted of 73 mothers of firstborn term girls and boys at 2, 5, and 13 months of age. Study 2 consisted of 335 mothers of infants of different gender, birth order, term status, and SES at 6 and 12 months. At all time-points across both studies, different aspects of temperament organized into positive and negative affectivity factors. Infant temperament proved stable and robust across gender, birth order, term status, and SES. Stability coefficients for temperament factors and scales were medium to large for shorter (<9 months) inter-assessment intervals and small to medium for longer (>10 months) intervals. However, the range of shared variance in average stability between adjacent time-points across both studies was only 20-29%, suggesting that 71-80% of the variance in temperament at a later time point was not explained by temperament at an earlier time point, indicating a great deal of instability in temperament. Interventions to adjust infant temperament could be beneficial because temperament affects childrens interactions with the world, colors how they interpret their experiences, shapes how they compare themselves to others and the manner in which others perceive and respond to them, and modifies the ways children interpret and manipulate their environment. Program II: Child Development and Parenting in Multicultural Perspective UNICEF estimated that 1 in 6 children aged 5-14 was involved in child labor. Child labor may be a barrier to achieving universal education because poor families need children to work, which prevents school attendance, although the empirical link between child labor and schooling has been incompletely documented. This study explores relations of child labor with school enrollment in 186,795 7- to 14-year-old children in 30 low and middle income countries LMIC. We control for child age and caregiver education and examine moderating effects of country and child gender. At the country level, a strong significant relation emerged between child labor and school enrollment. Relations between child labor and schooling at the country level are suggestive, but they do not help to explain whether child labor is consistently related to schooling at the family level. Aggregating across boys and girls at the family level, child labor was associated with a lower probability of school enrollment in 15 countries. Although most countries in this study have policies to provide free education, their implementation may be incomplete because of inadequate funding, infrastructure, and availability of qualified teachers. . Programs to promote universal education and reduce child labor in each country will likely need to be tailored to specific country, neighborhood, and family conditions. Adult appropriate responding to infant signals is vital to healthy child development. We investigated how infant crying, compared to infant laughing or adult crying, captures adults brain resources in a sample of nulliparous women and men, e.g., the effects of different sounds on cerebral activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex of the default mode network (DMN) and reaction times (RTs) while listeners engaged in self-referential decision and syllabic counting tasks, which, respectively, require the activation or deactivation of the DMN. In women, infant crying deactivated the DMN during the self-referential decision task; in men, female adult crying interfered with the DMN during the syllabic counting task. These findings point to different brain processes underlying responsiveness to crying in women and men and show that cerebral activation is modulated by situational contexts in which crying occurs. For decades, the United Nations has recognized that physical growth and survival of young girls and boys in developing countries are compromised, although the role that gender plays in growth outcomes and mortality remains unclear. We assessed differences between girls and boys in growth in 139,614 children under age 5, and child mortality of girls and boys collected from 226,798 childbearing women between the ages of 15 and 49 in 34 developing countries. When there were gender differences on height for age (stunting), weight for age (underweight), weight for height (wasting), and mortality, boys were at a greater disadvantage compared to girls. Further, correlations of gender effect sizes with the HDI indicated that boys were at a greater disadvantage compared to girls in countries with fewer socioeconomic resources. In sum, the disadvantages in growth and mortality found for boys reflect known biological/genetic differences in susceptibility to environmental conditions. The genetic advantage present for girls tends to be less protective with respect to health conditions that reflect transient circumstances and discretionary behavior, i.e., there were fewer gender differences in weight-for-height. Achievement of Millennium Development Goals pertaining to child health and equity will require continued efforts to modernize community infrastructure and health services and increase economic well-being.
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