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We argue that, contrary to standard views of development, children understand the world in terms of hidden, nonobvious structure. We review research showing that early in childhood, items are not understood strictly in terms of the features that present themselves in the immediate “here‐and‐now,” but rather are thought to have a hidden reality. We illustrate with two related but distinct examples: category essentialism, and attention to object history. We discuss the implications of each of these capacities for how children determine object value. Across a broad range of object types (natural and artifactual, real and virtual, durable and consumable), an item is evaluated very differently, depending on inferred qualities and context. In this way, children's early‐emerging conceptual frameworks influence how objects attain both psychological and monetary value, and may have important implications for which messages children find most persuasive.

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Adults differ in the extent to which they find spending money to be distressing; "tightwads" find spending money painful, and "spendthrifts" do not find spending painful enough. This affective dimension has been reliably measured in adults and predicts a variety of important financial behaviors and outcomes (e.g., saving behavior and credit scores). Although children's financial behavior has also received attention, feelings about spending have not been studied in children, as they have in adults. We measured the spendthrift-tightwad (ST-TW) construct in children for the first time, with a sample of 5-to 10-year-old children (N = 225). Children across the entire age range were able to reliably report on their affective responses to spending and saving, and children's ST-TW scores were related to parent reports of children's temperament and financial behavior. Further, children's ST-TW scores were predictive of whether they chose to save or spend money in the lab, even after controlling for age and how much they liked the offered items. Our novel findings-that children's feelings about spending and saving can be measured from an early age and relate to their behavior with money-are discussed with regard to theoretical and practical implications.

Digital financial platforms have become an integral part of consumers' lives-resulting in the datafication of

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Many social scientists are working to course correct the historical mistakes, abuses, and exclusionary practices of the field. To diversify who participates in developmental science, both as participants and as researchers, we argue that more attention must be paid to how we teach the science of developmental science (i.e., research methods). We propose that undergraduate research methods courses offer an opportunity to intervene on the academic pipeline and invite students of color into research through course curriculum. In this essay, we discuss guiding principles instructors should consider to transform their curriculum in the research training of undergraduate developmental scientists.

Children are sensitive to a number of considerations influencing distributions of resources, including equality, equity, and reciprocity. We tested whether children use a specific type of reciprocity norm-market norms-in which resources are distributed differentially based strictly on amount offered in return. In two studies, 195 children 5-10 years and 60 adults distributed stickers to friends offering same or different amounts of money. Overall, participants distributed more equally when offers were the same and more unequally when offers were different. Although sensitive to why friends offered different amounts of money, children increasingly incorporated market norms into their distributions with age, as the oldest children and adults distributed more to those offering more, irrespective of the reasons provided.