Social inequalities and human rights are inevitably linked to children's and adolescents' healthy development. Children who experience structural and interpersonal inequalities in access to resources and opportunities based on their gender, race, ethnicity, or other group categories are denied the right to fair treatment. We assert that investigating the that children hold regarding inequalities and human rights is necessary for creating fair and just societies. We take a constructivist approach to this topic which seeks to understand how individuals interpret and evaluate observed and experienced inequalities. Even young children think about these issues. Yet, throughout development, individuals must often weigh multiple, potentially conflicting considerations when interpreting, evaluating, and responding to social inequalities and rights violations. In these complex contexts, children and adolescents are neither fully "moral" nor fully "prejudiced." Rather, critical questions for research in this area concern when, why, and for whom young people reject inequalities and support rights, and, by contrast, when, why, and for whom they accept that inequalities and rights violations should be allowed to persist. This paper provides a brief overview of how different conceptions of social inequalities and rights are intrinsically linked together.

Early childhood marks a time where word learning is accompanied by rapid growth in the cognitive processes that underlie self-modulated and goal-directed behavior (i.e., executive functions). Although there is empirical evidence to support the association between executive functioning and vocabulary in childhood, inconsistent findings have been reported regarding the extent to which early executive functioning abilities predict later vocabulary outcomes and vice versa. To clarify the nature of the longitudinal relation between these two processes and to examine what, if any, claims can be made about their interdependence, a critical review of the literature was conducted. Also addressed are the conceptual and/or methodological differences that exist across studies conducted on this topic that may be contributing to some of the discrepancies reported in the longitudinal literature. Finally, this review provides practical and empirically informed future directions to serve as a resource for early childhood researchers advancing this area of study.

This paper presents the concepts of "neurodiversity" and the "neurodiversity approaches" towards disability and discusses how confusion regarding the meaning of these concepts exacerbates debate and conflict surrounding the neurodiversity approaches. For example, some claim the neurodiversity approaches focus solely on society and deny contributions of individual characteristics to disability (a controversial stance), whereas this paper joins other literature in acknowledging the contributions of both individual and society to disability. This paper also addresses other controversies related to neurodiversity, such as uncertainty regarding the scope of the approaches - to whom do they apply? - and their implications for diagnostic categories. Finally, it provides recommendations for developmental researchers who wish to carry out neurodiversity-aligned research: scholars are urged to study both individual neurodivergent people and the contexts around them; to consider both strengths and weaknesses; to recognize their own biases; and to listen to and learn from neurodivergent people.

Social justice refers to promoting fairness, equality, equity and rights across multiple aspects of society, including economic, educational, and workforce opportunities. A number of scholars across academia have called for a greater incorporation of social and racial justice approaches to the field of human development, and have asserted that social justice constitutes both a theoretical framework as well as a set of hypotheses to investigate and understand the human condition. The emergence, experience, and awareness of social injustice has to be much better understood from a psychological and developmental perspective. Four areas that reflect theoretical changes in human development research are discussed: a) socialization theories about race, b) ethnic/racial identity and development, c) developmental social identity and moral reasoning, and d) lay theories and social essentialism. Childhood is a period of intense change and development; human development research is uniquely positioned to promote change that will contribute to challenging social and racial injustice.

Children's emotion understanding is crucial for healthy social and academic development. The behaviors influenced by emotion understanding in childhood have received much attention, but less focus has been placed on factors that may predict individual differences in emotion understanding, the principle issue addressed in the current review. A more thorough understanding of the developmental underpinnings of this skill may allow for better prediction of emotion understanding, and for interventions to improve emotion understanding early in development. Here, we present theoretical arguments for the substantial roles of three aspects of children's environments in development of emotion understanding: family expressiveness, discussions about emotions, and language development, and we discuss how these are interrelated. Ultimately, this may aid in predicting the effects of environmental influences on development of emotion understanding more broadly, and the mechanisms by which they do so.

Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking (Baillargeon, 1998) or smiling (Mireault & Reddy, 2016). The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular Violation of Expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants' reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants' understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher & Di Paolo's (2007) Participatory Sense Making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants' reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophisticatication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.

Valued cultural practices of marginalized communities are often critiqued by dominant cultural communities. In this study, U.S. Mexican-heritage mothers who had experience in Indigenous ways (and limited schooling and parenting classes) espoused -a cultural practice involving indirectly guiding children's behavior through mock threats or lighthearted teasing to help them see how their misbehavior impacts others-as a positive, familiar practice that encourages active learning. However, European American mothers were very critical. Indications of cultural change came from U.S. Mexican-heritage mothers with experience in two cultural systems-Western schooling / parenting classes and Indigenous ways. Half viewed instructional ribbing positively, and half were negative and often referred to what they learned in parenting classes as a source of their change from prior generations. The value of instructional ribbing in some communities may be undermined by experience in dominant cultural systems where its familial and communal value and supports are not understood.

The ecological approach is a framework for studying the behavior of animals in their environments. My version of an ecological approach focuses on learning in the context of development. I argue that the most important thing animals learn is behavioral flexibility. They must acquire the ability to flexibly guide their behavior from moment to moment in the midst of developmental changes in their bodies, brains, skills, and environments. They must select, modify, and create behaviors appropriate to the current situation. In essence, animals must learn how to learn. I describe the central concepts and empirical strategies for studying learning in development and use examples of infants coping with novel tasks to give a flavor of what researchers know and still must discover about the functions and processes of learning (to learn) in (not and) development.

In this article, I answer the questions from Witherington and Boom's introduction to this special issue in the form of an imaginary interview, led by David Boom, equally imaginary editor of , an obscure but interesting journal that appears in imaginary physical print only, and which, as a consequence, has so far left no traces on the Internet….

Long-term learning trajectories evolve through microdevelopmental sequences (i.e., short-term processes of change during learning tasks) and depend on variability during and across learning tasks. The aim of this study is to examine the coupling between short-term teacher-student dynamics and students' long-term learning trajectories, thereby providing empirical support for the link between the short- and long-term time scale in cognitive development. For 31 students (ages 3-5 years) from regular and special education, five teacher-student interactions during science tasks were filmed and coded in real time with regard to the student's level of understanding and the teacher's support throughout the task. A hierarchical cluster analysis resulted in four different learning trajectories over the course of 1.5 years, labeled as a high-scoring, mid-scoring, fluctuating, and low-scoring group of students. When connecting these trajectories to microdevelopmental data, the interactions of the high-scoring students were characterized by more moment-to-moment variations in the teacher's support and student's level of understanding, while the low-scoring group had the least variability compared to the other groups. Students with emotional and behavioral disabilities were represented across all learning trajectories, despite frequent accounts in the literature on their significant academic delays.

Orientations toward harming and helping others are central to morality. These orientations undergo major transformations in early life. This paper proposes an interactionist and constructivist approach to early moral development, and discusses how children construct orientations toward harming and helping through everyday social interactions. A major developmental acquisition - typically evident by age three - is the ability to make judgments of right and wrong based on concerns with others' welfare. The paper concludes by outlining issues for future research on the development of morality from infancy to childhood.

Social exclusion and inclusion from groups, as well as the distribution of resources, are fundamental aspects of social life, and serve as sources of conflicts that bear on issues of fairness and equality, beginning in childhood. For the most part, research on social exclusion and allocation of resources has not focused on the issue of group membership. Yet, social exclusion from groups and the denial of resources reflect societal issues pertaining to social inequality and its counterpoint, fair treatment of others. Social inequality occurs when opportunities and resources are distributed unevenly in society, often through group norms about allocation that reflect socially defined categories of persons. This occurs at multiple levels of societal organization, from experiences of exclusion in childhood such as being left out of a play activity, to being denied access to resources as a member of a group. These situations extend to larger level experiences in the adult world concerning social exclusion from voting, for example, or participation in educational institutions. Thus, most decisions regarding social exclusion and the denial of resources involve considerations of group identity and group membership, implicitly or explicitly, which contribute to prejudice and bias, even though this has rarely been investigated in developmental science. Current research illustrating the role of group identity and autonomy regarding decision-making about social exclusion and the denial of resources is reviewed from the Social Reasoning Developmental model, one that integrates social domain theory and developmental social identity theories to investigate how children use moral, conventional, and psychological judgments to evaluate contexts reflecting group identity, group norms, and intergroup dynamics.

Key terms in research on moral development also exist in everyday language. Tafreshi and her colleagues (2014) propose that researchers should use terms in ways consistent with their usage by non-researchers. This commentary questions this claim, and argues for the importance of providing clear and explicit definitions of terms such as "morality" and "innate," of showing caution when attributing evaluations and judgments to infants, and of considering developmental processes preceding and succeeding the abilities demonstrated using looking-time and related measures. Progress is unlikely to result from conceptual analysis alone. However, conceptual clarity will make it easier to see what theories agree and disagree about as well as how opposing claims can be tested empirically.

"Tiger" parenting, as described by Amy Chua [2011], has instigated scholarly discourse on this phenomenon and its possible effects on families. Our eight-year longitudinal study, published in the [Kim, Wang, Orozco-Lapray, Shen, & Murtuza, 2013b], demonstrates that tiger parenting is not a common parenting profile in a sample of 444 Chinese American families. Tiger parenting also does not relate to superior academic performance in children. In fact, the best developmental outcomes were found among children of supportive parents. We examine the complexities around defining tiger parenting by reviewing classical literature on parenting styles and scholarship on Asian American parenting, along with Amy Chua's own description of her parenting method, to develop, define, and categorize variability in parenting in a sample of Chinese American families. We also provide evidence that supportive parenting is important for the optimal development of Chinese American adolescents.

The emergence of a new sign language since the late 1970s in Nicaragua enables us to capture the effects of successive cohorts of learners on an emerging grammar and to observe how elements are reshaped from one form and function to another. Here we document the contrastive use of a device that has been found to be central to the grammars of sign languages: the spatial modulation of signs. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, this device has two primary functions: expressing the participants of events (that is, indicating who), and describing locations and orientations of referents (that is, indicating where). We ask whether the two uses reduce to a single construction type, or if the more abstract who construction derived from the more iconic and concrete where construction. We compare the first two successive cohorts of deaf signers to acquire the language in its first decade. We find that as learners created new constructions to meet the new functions, they did not simply apply an already developed form more broadly, nor did they develop the more abstract application from the more iconic one. Instead, the more abstract who construction appears to have conventionalized first. Thus, the forms either emerged independently, or split very early in the 1980s, before either had developed as a consistently applied form.

Theoretical accounts of grammatical limitations in specific language impairment (SLI) have been polarized between those that postulate problems with domain-specific grammatical knowledge, and those that regard grammatical deficits as downstream consequences of perceptual or memory limitations. Here we consider an alternative view that grammatical deficits arise when the learning system is biased towards memorization of exemplars, and is poor at extracting statistical dependencies from the input. We examine evidence that SLI involves deficits in extracting nonadjacent dependencies from input, leading to reliance on rote learning, and consider how far this may be part of a limitation of procedural learning, or a secondary consequence of memory limitations.

Studying human development involves describing, explaining, and optimizing intraindividual change and interindividual differences in such change and, as such, requires longitudinal research. The selection of the appropriate type of longitudinal design requires selecting the option that best addresses the theoretical questions asked about developmental process and the use of appropriate statistical procedures to best exploit data derived from theory-predicated longitudinal research. This paper focuses on several interrelated problematics involving the treatment of time and the timing of observations that developmental scientists face in creating theory-design fit and in charting in change-sensitive ways developmental processes across life. We discuss ways in which these problematics may be addressed to advance theory-predicated understanding of the role of time in processes of individual development.