The prevailing viewpoint on the history of childhood is that: (a) there was no concept of childhood prior to the 17th century; (b) children were cruelly disciplined; (c) there was a formal parent-child relationship. The evidence presented to support the thesis is suspect and there is little systematic analysis of any source. Moreover, the thesis is not universally accepted - other authors have shown that there was a concept of childhood in the middle ages. In addition, the main writers have concentrated on discipline, to the virtual exclusion of all other childhood experiences. This study, covering the period from the 16th to the 19th century inclusive, has attempted to provide a detailed analysis of primary sources of evidence (autobiographies and diaries) in order to reconstruct child life in the past. Newspaper reports on child abuse cases occurring before the prevention of cruelty to children act in 1009 have also been examined. The methodological problems inherent in the sources used have been considered. The information provided by the texts suggests that parents did possess a concept of childhood, were not indifferent to their children and did not treat the latter cruelly. (With reference to the last point, the newspaper reports also reveal that child abuse was condemned before specific child protection legislation appeared). Although there was discord between parents and adolescent offspring, in the vast majority of families there was an affectionate parent-child relationship. Parents did not totally control their children's lives. Moreover, the texts suggest that the basics of child life have changed very little. Children did pass through such developmental stages as teething and talking at a similar age to modern children, although the texts do disclose the considerable amount of individual variation. Children played and also received at least some education in every century studied. Nonetheless there have been some changes in parental care and child life, as revealed in the texts: the concept of the innocence of childhood did not appear till the 10th century; there was an increase in thinking about the nature of childhood and the parental role in the abstract; there was a lessening of parental control in such areas as career and marriage through the centuries and there was an increase in the severity of the discipline meted out to children in the early 19th century.

The present study investigated the development of sensitivity to temporal synchrony between sounds of impact and pauses in the movement of an object by infants of 2 1/2, 4 and 6 months of age. Ninety infants were tested across four experiments with side-by-side videos of a red and white square and a blue and yellow triangle along with a centralized soundtrack which was synchronized with only one of the films. This preference phase was then followed by a search phase, where the two films were accompanied by intermittent bursts of the soundtrack from each object. Twomonth- olds showed no evidence of matching films and soundtracks on the basis of synchrony, however 4-month-olds looked more on the second block of trials to the object which paused when the sound occurred and directed more first looks during the preference phase to the matching object. Six-month-olds demonstrated significantly more first looks to the mismatched object during the search phase only. These results suggest that infants relate impact sounds with synchronous pauses in continuous motion by the age of four months.

Two experiments examined operant leg kick responses to a panel by six 3-month-old infants under baseline, immediate reinforcement, delayed reinforcement, and yoked-control conditions using a discrete trial procedure and a single-subject repeated-measures design. Two infants participated in the first experiment and four infants participated in the second experiment. The research design of Experiment I was baseline (A), 5s delay of reinforcement (C), yoked-control (A'), and immediate reinforcement (B). There were two experimental orders in the second experiment. The first order consisted of baseline (A), immediate reinforcement (B), yoked-control (A'), and 5s delay of reinforcement (C). The second order consisted of baseline (A), 5s delayed reinforcement (C), yoked-control (A'), and immediate reinforcement (B). The reinforcer was a combination of multicolored holiday lights and music, and a moving hand puppet. Changes in experimental phases were based on the attainment of learning and stability criteria. With the exception of one infant, leg kicks to a to a panel were learned under both immediate and 5s delay of reinforcement conditions, with learning appearing to be attained more rapidly under immediate reinforcement.

Few studies have examined the effects of divorce on internalizing symptomatology in children, and none have done so in a clinic sample. The present study examined this issue in a clinic sample of children with anxiety disorders (aged 6-16). Because past research has found that it is not divorce but the child's perspective of marital conflict that is the crucial factor in examining negative outcomes, it was hypothesized that children who reported worry about marital conflict would show greater internalizing symptomatology than those who reported no worries, regardless of whether they came from intact or divorced homes. Internalizing symptomatology was operationalized by children's scores on anxiety and depression scales, as well as the number and severity of clinical diagnoses. Results revealed that worriers had significantly higher levels of anxiety than non-worriers. They were also elevated in depression. The results did not support the hypothesis that worriers from divorced homes would show the most severe internalizing symptomatology. Results are discussed in terms of the marital conflict and the childhood anxiety literature.

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No description available.

This study examined a technique to assist children to recall more information about witnessed events. Thirty-eight fourth-grade children from a public grade school in Miami Florida participated in the experiment. The participants watched a Red Cross demonstration and were interviewed one week later about details of the demonstration. All of the children were interviewed using a police style interview. In addition, half of the children were instructed to draw during the interview. The current study supported previous findings that the instruction to draw increased the amount of information recalled. The effect of drawing was greatest for high-visual events. In addition, the instruction to draw prompted an increase in non-verbal information, which had an unusually high accuracy rate.

This study examined two competitive hypotheses: the double-jeopardy hypothesis and the buffering effect hypothesis on whether parental divorce affects adopted children and non-adopted children similarly or differently. The double-jeopardy hypothesis suggests that when adopted children experience their parents' divorce, they perform worse because they carry two risk factors, adoption status and parental divorce, while their non-adopted counterparts carry only the risk factor of their parents' divorce. The buffering effect hypothesis suggests that, being adopted children, their previous experiences of parental loss help them better deal with the later loss of their parents' divorce so their adoption status is a protective factor rather than a risk factor. Secondary analyses of a nation-wide data set were executed using different statistical methods such as ANOVA and Chi-square on different outcome variables. The results indicated that there was no evidence supporting the double-jeopardy hypothesis. That is, adopted children from divorced families did not perform significantly worse than the non-adopted children from divorced families on any outcome variable. The results also indicated that there was only weak evidence supporting the buffering effect hypothesis. The general conclusion based on the results from most of the outcome variables suggest that adopted children from divorced families do not perform differently than the biological children from divorced families.

The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of bullying and victimization in a metropolitan area. A cross-sectional study with kindergarten (n = 127) and first grade (n = 126) children was conducted in two Miami-Dade County Public Schools and three private schools in the same area. Bullying and victimization behavior and social acceptance were assessed through peer nomination and the mental health outcomes of depression and anxiety were assessed through children's self-report. Teachers and parents also completed a social behavior scale for each child. Three areas of analyses were conducted pertaining to membership classification of social roles and the social acceptance and mental health outcomes associated with those roles, reporter agreement within the social roles, and the psychometric properties of the Childhood Social Behavior Scale. Results showed an overall negative pattern of adjustment for children identified as a member of any of the negative social roles. Also, the results support a new analytic approach to the investigation of social roles. The implication of these findings for early identification, social policy, and effective prevention strategies are discussed.

This study is a secondary analysis of a data set (N = 367) collected by Cadoret (1990). This data set includes three major parts: Adoptee biological data, the adoptive parent interview, and the young adult adoptee interview. In this study, adoptive parents' retrospective reports of infant temperament were used as the independent variable. The adoptees' self-reported young adult outcomes were the dependent variables. The purpose of this study is to find whether early temperament reported by adoptive parents can predict later adoptees' behavior reported by themselves. The present study used analysis of variance to examine relationships between early temperament and later behavioral outcomes. The results indicate that as a group, difficult infants tend to develop more antisocial behavior and are more likely to be arrested and convicted while slow-to-warm up babies tend to develop more obsessive-compulsive behavior. The slow-to-warm-up group also was found to use less alcohol than the difficult and easy groups.