Preschool teachers have important impacts on children’s academic outcomes, and teachers’ misperceptions of children’s academic skills could have negative consequences, particularly for low-income preschoolers. This study utilized data gathered from 123 preschool teachers and their 760 preschoolers from 70 low-income, racially diverse centers. Hierarchical linear modeling was utilized to account for the nested data structure. Even after controlling for children’s actual academic skill, older children, children with stronger social skills, and children with fewer inattentive symptoms were perceived to have stronger academic abilities. Contrary to hypotheses, preschoolers with more behavior problems were perceived by teachers to have significantly better pre-academic abilities than they actually had. Teachers’ perceptions were not associated with child gender or child race/ethnicity. Although considerable variability was due to teacher-level characteristics, child characteristics explained 42% of the variability in teachers’ perceptions about children’s language and pre-literacy ability and 41% of the variability in teachers’ perceptions about mathability. Notably, these perceptions appear to have important impacts over time. Controlling for child baseline academic skill and child characteristics, teacher perceptions early in the preschool year were significantly associated with child academic outcomes during the spring for both language and pre-literacy and math. Study implications with regard to the achievement gap are discussed.

The present study examined whether ineffective discipline, single parent status, social support, parent involvement, and parent depression predicted changes in preschoolers’ (N = 129) behavior problems. This study also evaluated whether child sex and ethnicity moderated the relationships between these variables and changes in problem behavior. Parents completed questionnaires at the beginning of the study, and parent, teacher, and observational ratings of children’s behavior problems were collected twice during the school year. Parents’ own social support predicted improvement for boys and parent depression was associated with worsening symptoms for girls. Single parenthood and parent involvement predicted changes in behavior problems for the sample as a whole. Several significant ethnic differences emerged, highlighting the importance of considering cultural context in studies of parenting and child externalizing behavior.

This study uses country and regional contrasts to examine culture-common and communityspecific variation in mother-infant emotional relationships. Altogether, 220 Argentine, Italian, and U.S. American mothers and their daughters and sons, living in rural and metropolitan settings, were observed at home at infant age 5 months. Both variable-and person-centered perspectives of dyadic emotional relationships were analyzed. Supporting the notion that adequate emotional relationships are a critical and culture-common characteristic of human infant development, across all samples most dyads scored in the adaptive range in terms of emotional relationships. Giving evidence of community-specific characteristics, Italian mothers were more sensitive, and Italian infants more responsive, than Argentine and U.S. mothers and infants; in addition, rural mothers were more intrusive than metropolitan mothers, and rural dyads more likely than expected to be classified as mid-range in emotional relationships and less likely to be classified as high in emotional relationships. Adaptive emotional relationships appear to be a culture-common characteristic of mother-infant dyads near the beginning of life, but this relational construct is moderated by community-specific (country and regional) context. Culture-Common and Community-Specific Psychological ProcessesThis study has as its main goal to evaluate and compare culture-common and communityspecific psychological processes in emotional relationships between mothers and their young infants. Theory asserts that establishing adaptive levels of emotional relationships near the beginning of life is requisite to mother-infant dyads everywhere to ensure wholesome child development (Barnard & Solchany, 2002). To test this assertion, we recruited and evaluated emotional relationships in families with young infants in six distinct ecologies: Three were country (Argentina, Italy, and the United States), and two were region within each country (rural and metropolitan). Establishing adaptive emotional relationships may be a universal psychological process, but context can be expected to moderate their level or expression (Bornstein, 1995). Thus, next to the identification of evolutionary and biological determinants of psychological universals (Cooper & Denner, 1998; Norenzayan & Heine, 2005), contemporary cultural theory casts the identification of ecological moderation by physical and social circumstances as essential to developmental study Address (Bornstein, 1980(Bornstein, , 2009Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006;Cole, 2005; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997).Human beings inherit both biological evolution and a transmitted culture. These mutually interacting forces shape human psychology. Contemporary evolutionary thinking appeals to the species-common genome, and this theoretical foundation promotes adoption and trust in psychic unity; that is, the biological heritage of some psychological processes presupposes their universality. At the same time, modern cultural psychologists investig...

Objective: Considerableresearch has examinedthe effects of maternal depression on children, but few studieshave focused on the relation between paternal and child depressive symptoms, particularly during early childhood. Even fewer studies have been longitudinal, leaving open questions about how paternal and child depression covary over time. The present study sought to address this gap by examining the relation between fathers’ and children’s depressive symptoms over a 3-year period. Method: Participants were153 preschool childrenwith behavior problems and their parents. Three longitudinal analytic approacheswere used to examine how father and child depression change together and predict one another over time.Additional analyses examined whetherexternalizing problems or maternal depression might account for the associations between fathers’ and children’s depressive symptoms. Results: Changes in paternal depression significantly predicted changes in father-reported and mother-reported child depressive symptoms. These effects were evident both in year-to-year fluctuations as well as in linear trajectories across the 3-year period. Cross-lagged analyses suggested that these relationsmay have beendriven by father-effects; paternal depression at one time point predicted child depression at the next time point, but child depression did not significantly predict later paternal depression. We found little evidence that externalizing problems or maternal depression accounted for the relations between fathers’ and children’s depressive symptoms. Conclusions: Results provide convergent evidencethat fathers’ depression may play an important role in the development of depressive symptoms in young children, and underscore the importance of including fathers in studies of depression in families.

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