Books in the Elements in Child Development series

Gender is a highly salient and important social group that shapes how children interact with others and how they are treated by others. In this Element, we offer an overview and review of the research on gender development in childhood from a developmental science perspective.

This Element focuses on the environment and how it is implicated in children's development. A broad array of social and physical features connected to children's home life and the neighborhoods where children live, including multiple aspects of parenting, housing characteristics and the increased prevalence of media in daily life are addressed.

Natural selection has operated as strongly on the early stages of the lifespan as adulthood. One evolved feature of human childhood is high levels of behavioral, cognitive, and neural plasticity. Taking an evolutionary perspective provides better understanding of children and how changes in the development of our ancestors produced modern humans.

In this Element, I first introduce intelligence in terms of historical definitions. I then review the major approaches to understanding intelligence and its development. These approaches, taken together, present a much more complex portrait of intelligence and its development than would be ascertained just from scores on intelligence tests.

This Element provides a comprehensive yet concise account of scientific research on children's religious and spiritual (RS) development. It examines the key themes and challenges that researchers face to advance the science of children's RS development.

In the first decade of life, children become bilingual in different language learning environments. Many children start learning two languages from birth (Bilingual First Language Acquisition). In early childhood hitherto monolingual children start hearing a second language through daycare or preschool (Early Second Language Acquisition). Yet other hitherto monolingual children in middle childhood may acquire a second language only after entering school (Second Language Acquisition). This Element explains how these different language learning settings dynamically affect bilingual children's language learning trajectories. All children eventually learn to speak the societal language, but they often do not learn to fluently speak their non-societal language and may even stop speaking it. Children's and families' harmonious bilingualism is threatened if bilingual children do not develop high proficiency in both languages. Educational institutions and parental conversational practices play a pivotal role in supporting harmonious bilingual development.