The Next 50 Years: Considering Gender as a Context for Understanding Young Children’s Peer Relationships

The study of children’s peer relationships has been well represented within the pages of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Particularly over the last decade, the pace of publishing studies on peer relationships has increased. Despite this upswing in interest in peer relationships, significant gaps remain. In this article, we focus on a particularly overlooked and significant area of peer relationships, namely, the role of sex-segregated peer interactions and how these relate to development in early childhood. We review why this topic is important for researchers to consider and highlight promising directions for research that we hope will appear in future volumes of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

Google Trends Search Information Related to Breastfeeding in the U.S.

[EN] Given the importance of breastfeeding to maternal and infant health, we employed Google Trends to examine U.S. mothers’ search engine use for information related to breastfeeding. We conducted an analysis of the use of the Google search engine related to the broad topic of ‘breastfeeding”, as well as patterns for more specific terms related to breastfeeding. Given the significant role that breastfeeding pain plays in influencing breastfeeding persistence, we examined patterns in mothers’ use of Google to seek information related to breastfeeding pain and how that compares to other breastfeeding topics. We also examined diurnal patterns in these searches as well as state-level characteristics that predict search intensity. We found that searches related to breastfeeding have increased over time and that searches related to breastfeeding pain were the most common. Mothers’ searches tended to occur late at night and were more likely to occur in relatively unpopulated states and for states with lower income. The findings illustrate how Google Trends can be analyzed to highlight the concerns of new mothers in real-time and how such data can  reveal how mothers use the internet to seek out help, guidance, and support for issues related to breastfeeding.Fabes, R.; Bodman, D.; Van Vleet, B.; Martin, C. (2022). Google Trends Search Information Related to Breastfeeding in the U.S. En 4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 41-48. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2022.2022.15030414

The Relations of Children’s Dispositional Prosocial Behavior to Emotionality, Regulation, and Social Functioning

The purpose of this study was to examine the relations of a measure of children’s dispositional prosocial behavior (i.e., peer nominations) to individual differences in children’s negative emotionality, regulation, and social functioning. Children with prosocial reputations tended to be high in constructive social skills (i.e., socially appropriate behavior and constructive coping) and attentional regulation, and low in negative emotionality. The relations of children’s negative emotionality to prosocial reputation were moderated by level of dispositional attentional regulation. In addition, the relations of prosocial reputation to constructive social skills and parent-reported negative emotionality (for girls) increased with age. Vagal tone, a marker of physiological regulation, was negatively related to girls’ prosocial reputation

Relations of the use of out-of-school suspensions in U.S. public pre-kindergarten programs to neighborhood opportunity

A key goal of the U.S. and its citizens is to promote positive development for young children and their families, particularly those who are marginalized and vulnerable. However, suspending young children from pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) undermines this goal. The primary purpose of the present research was to document the extent to which young children are suspended from Pre-K and how these suspensions are related to the quality of the Pre-K neighborhood. To do this, we used national data from the 26,122 public Pre-K schools in the 2017-2018 Civil Rights Data Collection and examined how the quality of neighborhood resources related to the use of out-of-school suspensions (OSS) for all children, as well as separately for Black and white children, and male and female students. We found that children living in low-opportunity neighborhoods tended to be enrolled in U.S. Pre-K public school programs that had high rates of OSS. We also found that disparities in the rates of use of OSS were greater for Black relative to white students and male relative to female students in Pre-K schools that resided in relatively low-resourced neighborhoods. The findings highlight that one of the ways that neighborhoods influence children's health and well-being is through the disciplinary culture of its schools. The present findings also highlight that disparities in the use of OSS are tied to these neighborhood opportunities and conditions

Arizona\u27s Vulnerable Populations

Arizona’s vulnerable populations are struggling on a daily basis but usually do so in silence, undetected by traditional radar and rankings, often unaware themselves of their high risk for being pushed or pulled into a full crisis. Ineligible for financial assistance under strict eligibility guidelines, they don’t qualify as poor because vulnerable populations are not yet in full crisis. To be clear, this report is not about the “poor,” at least not in the limited sense of the word. It is about our underemployed wage earners, our single-parent households, our deployed or returning military members, our under-educated and unskilled workforce, our debt-ridden neighbors, our uninsured friends, our family members with no savings for an emergency, much less retirement