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In Chapter 4 (“Magical Thinking and Children's Cognitive Development”), the relationships between children's magical thinking and more traditional aspects of their cognitive development are discussed. Indeed, despite the fact that multinational industries (such as toy production and entertainment) exploit and support magical beliefs in children and many TV programs for children show magical characters, surprisingly little is known about the effects of magical thinking and magical beliefs on children's cognitive and social development. Is involvement in magical thinking confined to the department of entertainment, or has it also to do with more practical aspects of children's lives, such as learning and social communication? It is hypothesized that magical thinking does indeed positively affect children's cognitive development, by enhancing creative divergent thinking in children. Experiments are presented that demonstrate that exposing children to a movie containing strong magical effects increased their performance on creativity tasks to a significantly larger extent than did exposing a control group of children to a similar movie but without any reference to magic.

Adoptive mothers do not linger over the question of genes the way that donor-assisted families do. Without a biological connection, the discovery of who their children are (personality and talents) is greeted as a welcome surprise. This chapter notes that some of the women in the interviews have met the biological mothers (and sometimes fathers), but even then they do not focus on genetic inheritance. Adoptive mothers acknowledge an innate separation between the genetic and the social, believing that their influence is critical to their child's development. However, almost all of the adoptive mothers in this study spoke of ways their children might eventually trace their birth parents, highlighting their acknowledgment of biology's ability to aid in their children's quest for self-knowledge.

From early on in development, children assume that certain pieces of information to which they are exposed, are shared by members of their cultural community. This is indeed a crucial developmental achievement because much of what children need to know to function adaptively in the world is knowledge that is socially constructed and bound. In many ways, defining what is conventional is akin to defining what is cultural. This chapter reviews evidence regarding both, what and who children treat as conventional, and shows that indeed from a young age, children are neither completely generalists nor universalists. While this conclusion does not deny the possibility that children start off with a promiscuous conventionality, eventually learning how to filter out certain types of knowledge or people, the evidence reviewed here highlights the need for a developmentally sensitive account of the process by which children make these distinctions. A number of mechanisms known to be available to children at the relevant ages are proposed, which can help children figure out the domain of conventions.

This chapter examines the effects of restricted conversation interaction on the theory of mind (ToM) of children with cerebral palsy. Research on typically developing children has found children to be competent early in life with an urge to interact and communicate. Development takes place in a complex interaction between, on the one hand, internal conditions, and biological and cognitive maturation, and, on the other hand, external factors, more specifically, the society and people around the child. Communication can be described as a co-constructive act, where intentionality and understanding of the other's thoughts and intentions are important components for success. It is characterized by reciprocity and meaning. The chapter explores the consequences for performance on ToM tasks if full participation in this intricate interaction is hindered by physical impairment or difficulty in producing speech sounds. It reviews studies indicating a delay in children with cerebral palsy and communicative disabilities that parallels the performance of deaf children from hearing families. The chapter argues that it is important to provide children with cerebral palsy and communicative problems with appropriate and sufficient communication aids early to enhance social cognitive development.

This chapter addresses the question of whether bilingualism confers an advantage in terms of children's understanding and appreciation of messages as intended by speakers in conversation and key aspects of their moral cognition. It shows that, compared with monolingual children, bilinguals (i.e., in Italian and Slovenian, Italian and Slovenian, or English and Japanese) aged three to six years display a more advanced understanding of speakers' intended meanings in recognizing effective communicative messages. The chapter also examines the extent to which bilinguals' advantage in communicative insight extends to a consideration of the means and ends of actions that critically influence others' welfare. Both monolinguals and bilinguals showed evidence of an early ‘moral sense’ on measures of utilitarian moral reasoning that concern the evaluation of means and ends for preventing harm. However, bilingual children (in Italian and Slovenian) displayed a more adult-like reasoning pattern at an early age. Both language exposure and cultural influences are discussed as bases for differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in these key aspects of their cognitive development.

This chapter addresses the lengthy debate between those who claim that children acquire the principles necessary to count by actively using verbal routines and theories that propose tacit knowledge of those principles is acquired independently from verbal experiences with counting words. It investigates whether domain-specific lexical differences across different languages affect children's mental processes and performance in a nonverbal addition task. Based on work carried out, this chapter compares data from children who are raised speaking only Warlpiri or Anindilyakwa — languages that have very limited number vocabularies — with data from children who were raised speaking English. Speakers of Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa, aged between four and seven years old, were tested at two remote sites in the Northern Territory of Australia. These children used spatial strategies extensively, and were significantly more accurate when they did so than English-speaking children who used spatial strategies very infrequently, but relied on an enumeration strategy supported by counting words to do the addition task. The main spatial strategy exploited the known visual memory strengths of Aboriginals, and involved matching the spatial pattern of the augend set and the addend. These findings suggest that counting words, far from being necessary for exact arithmetic, offer one strategy among others. They also suggest that spatial models for number do not need to be one-dimensional vectors, as in a mental number line, but can be at least two-dimensional.

Drawing on sociological and psychological theoretical perspectives, this chapter elaborates on two research questions. How does parents' formal education influence children's internet use? And how does children's development by age interact with their family background in terms of an autonomous and competent use of the internet? The interrelation between these two processes, parental socialisation and development by age, helps us understand the interplay of children's activities in dealing with the internet and their parents' handling of that. The chapter first discusses the persistent importance of social inequality for information and communications technology (ICT) use in the industrialised countries. It then elaborates on a theoretical framework by discussing both children and parents' individual agency and how these are interlinked with respect to their societal status. Finally, based on the EU Kids Online dataset, it tests out the theoretical ideas and hypotheses and ask how parental socialisation shapes young people's online competences, and how children's development by age interacts with structural processes and dynamics of socialisation. Children with a lower socio-economic background agree that they know more about the internet than their parents, as these children might acquire internet skills often independently from their parents.

This chapter analyzes three temporal modes in the process of adoption: the length of the process of seeking and placing a child, the child's own development, and the cycle of genealogical transmission. The temporal dimension of the child's development refocuses the main rationale for adoption and forces us to concentrate on issues of protection, health, and welfare. Exploring recent policy developments in Québec, Canada, the chapter shows how new practices and attitudes regarding the closed or open nature of adoption and the right of adoptees to know their origins have called plenary adoption into question. As anthropologists have shown, most societies augment rather than suppress recognition of the child's birth family ties when he or she grows up in another family.

Stress among either parents or children is not a direct outcome of child deafness but rather stems from differences in the context, child experiences, parent and child characteristics, coping resources, and school and community supports. Childhood hearing loss can make some of the common daily demands more challenging or might establish a completely new set of demands. This chapter reviews the everyday stressors in various domains encountered by children who are deaf and hard of hearing, and their parents. Models of child and adolescent psychopathology have recognized the potential importance of stressors in the etiology and maintenance of mental health symptoms and well-being. A more comprehensive understanding of parental stressors can have a positive impact on children who are deaf or hard of hearing by empowering parents to develop competence and involvement in their child’s education and development. To provide family-centered care to families of children with hearing loss, professionals must identify and understand these stressors.

This chapter presents a brief history of Corby and its Scottish connection as a backcloth to the work of the Pen Green Centre since 1983. The main focus is on the values of parents and staff and the resulting research on involving parents in their children’s learning from 1997 to 2000 and subsequent developments in practice. An important starting point was the ‘Local Action Group’ against the proposed centre as a service for ‘problem families’, and the appointment of Margy Whalley, who had experience of community projects in Brazil and Papua, New Guinea, as Head of Centre to create something more positive. Freire’s concept of ‘dialogue’ is used to describe the two-way conversation that workers and parents can engage in to build understanding and agreement of how best to support children’s development and learning.