The authors stress that total assessment prior to intervention is crucial, including standardized testing, observations of behavior, developmental history, and play interview. Techniques presented provide a holistic approach for evaluating the referred preschool child.

Past research with 152 preschoolers found that having an imaginary companion or impersonating an imaginary character was positively correlated with theory of mind performance. Three years later, 100 children from this study were retested to assess the developmental course of play with imaginary companions and impersonation of imaginary characters and how these types of role play were related to...

Whether children share in anticipation of future benefits returned by a partner is an interesting question. In this study, 5-year-old children and an adult partner played a sharing game, in which children donated first and the partner donated afterward. In Experiment 1, the partner's resources were more attractive than the child's. In the reciprocal condition, the child was told that s/he would...

Over 1 million child fatalities occur per year, the bulk of them in less-developed countries. There remains a need, from country to country, to identify personal and environmental risk factors correlated with this mortality. The present study focused on Pakistan, home to a sizeable pediatric population of 60 million. The study employed case-control methods (i) to identify situational risk facto...

This study integrates two important developments, the concept of health lifestyles (which has focused on adults and adolescents) and the increased attention to early childhood. We introduce the concept of children's health lifestyles, identifying differences from adult health lifestyles and articulating intergenerational transmission and socialization processes shaping children's health lifesty...

The purpose of this study was to verify a theoretical model of parents' responses to difficulties they experienced with their child. The model presents relationships between seven variables: (a) discrepancy between parental goal and the child's current level of development, (b) parental experience of a difficulty, (c) representation of the child in the parent's mind, (d) parent's withdrawal fro...

In this article we investigate preschool children's understanding of indeterminacy by examining their ability to distinguish between determinate situations--in which the available evidence eliminates all uncertainty about an outcome--and indeterminate situations--in which it does not. We argue that a full understanding of indeterminacy requires the coordination of 3 processes: search, evaluatio...

Children (3.5-8.5 years; n = 105) heard claims about the occurrence of improbable or impossible events, then were asked whether the events could really happen. Some claims were based on informants' first-hand observations and others were hearsay. A baseline group (n = 56) reported their beliefs about these events without hearing testimony. Neither first-hand claims nor hearsay influenced belief...