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In this study, we adopt the human capital formation framework to understand the association of the various risk and protective factors in the family settings of rural children with their cognitive performance as measured by vocabulary and math test scores. We examine the role of caregiver reading or storytelling to children at younger age and the deprivation of parental care due to labor migration at different stages of childhood on child performance in vocabulary and math tests when they are over 10 years old. Our findings confirm the crucial role of parental presence in child's cognitive development both during early childhood and later ages. Extended periods of parental absence during early and later years of childhood are most pernicious for child cognitive performance. Our analysis also reveals significantly positive effect of caregiver reading and storytelling on children's vocabulary test performance. This study provides strong evidence for the benefits of programs that promote good parenting practice and caregiver involvement in child cognitive development., (© 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

In this study, 285 Chinese core journal papers involving early childhood sports in the CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) database from 1993 to 2022 were selected as samples. Text mining and data statistical analysis tools, such as BICOMB2.0, SPSS22.0, UCINET6.0, EXCEL2016, and other research methods in bibliometrics, such as word frequency analysis, co word clustering analysis, multidimensional scale analysis, and strategic coordinate map analysis, were used to explore the status and evolutionary trends of early childhood sports in China. The results are as follows: Since 2011, the annual number of documents has indicated a wave-like increasing trend every year, reaching its peak in 2020. In total, 237 institutions participated in this study. The journal distribution of papers in this field was close to the 1:4:16 ratio of Bradford's law. A relatively stable periodic group was formed. 12 cluster themes have been formed in the field of children's sports in China.

Background and Aim: Physical activity is an important means to promote the comprehensive and healthy development of children's bodies and minds. The national health strategy and population policy adjustment, the development of kindergartens, and the deterioration of children's physical health have all worked together to bring unprecedented opportunities for the development of children's sports in China. The purpose of this paper is to study the background information of the contents of the curriculum of preschool physical education ability of year 4 students and develop the curriculum to improve the preschool physical education ability of year 4 students. Materials and Methods: The researcher has studied the literature on the development of physical education teachers' physical education ability curriculum to cultivate year 4 students' physical education ability from the aspects of the curriculum development process, components, implementation, and evaluation, and has studied the quality of students' teachers from textbooks, academic documents, and related research. The researcher also used a simple random sampling method to have 4 teachers as a sample. The population is 8 expert teachers in physical education. The research instruments of this study are an interview questionnaire on preschool's physical education ability and lesson plans. Results: Research findings: 1) The 6 components of the course include principles, objectives, content, instructional strategies using situational teaching methods, materials, and evaluation. 2) Preschool physical education ability which includes: 2.1) General ability, 2.2) Special ability, and 2.3) Application ability. After that, the researcher designed and completed the training course components of preschool physical education, and then evaluated the quality by five experts. The IOC value was between 3.80-4.00, and the interrater reliability value was between 0.77-0.79> 0.5. The course components were modified according to the experts' suggestions. Conclusion: The components of the course which include 6 components could improve the preschool physical education ability of year 4 students effectively.

Objectives: Our study use the height and weight data of Chinese students aged 7-18 years from 1985 to 2014 to investigate the inequality and changing trend of height and weight of children and adolescents in different regions., Methods: Our study extracted data from the 1985, 2000, and 2014 Chinese National Survey on Students' Constitution and Health (CNSSCH) for a comparative analysis of the height and weight of children and adolescents aged 7-18 years in a developed city (Shanghai) and an underdeveloped province (Guizhou). The coefficients of variation (CVs) of height and weight between urban and rural boys and girls were also calculated., Results: Since 1985, the height difference between urban and rural areas has decreased from 4.24 to 2.41 cm for boys and 3.72 to 1.99 cm for girls. The weight difference for boys and girls increased from 1.83 to 3.10 kg and from 0.97 to 1.80 kg, respectively. However, from 1985 to 2014, the height and weight differences between Shanghai and Guizhou increased. In addition, from 1985 to 2014, the coefficient of height variation was greater for rural students than urban students while the coefficient of weight variation was greater for urban students than rural students., Conclusions: Although the difference between urban and rural areas has recently decreased, the difference between developed area (Shanghai) and underdeveloped area (Guizhou) has increased. In particular, the difference in height and weight between children in developed areas (Shanghai) and non-developed areas (Guizhou) has become larger since 1985-2014, rather than gradually decreasing over time., (© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Sustainable Development Goal Target 4.2.1 is monitored by determining the proportion of children aged 24 to 59 months who are developmentally on track in the domains of health, learning, and psychosocial well-being. UNICEF has developed a caregiver report measure, the Early Childhood Development Index 2030 (ECDI2030), to measure progress towards this target. This paper examines whether a newly developed tool, the Early Childhood Development Assessment Scale--Direct Assessment (ECDAS-DA) can add value to the measurement of Target Indicator 4.2.1 by complementing UNICEF's ECDI2030, and explores the psychometric properties of the ECDAS-DA. A total of 956 children (476 girls) aged 3 to 5 years from Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar were administered the ECDAS-DA in individual sessions. Caregivers provided responses to a survey based on UNICEF's ECDI2030. Confirmatory Factor Analyses indicated that learning, health, and psychosocial well-being domains of the ECDAS-DA were three component parts of one underlying construct of early child development. Significant correlations between the ECDAS-DA and the caregiver-reported ECDI2030 survey were found in the learning and health domains but findings were mixed for the psychosocial well-being domain. Multiple measures of early development could be important in measuring SDG Target 4.2.1 and the ECDAS-DA has the potential to complement UNICEF's ECDI2030.

The seven papers in this issue address a variety of challenges that parents in several different cultural places encounter as they do their best to ensure their children's safe, happy, and successful development from infancy through middle childhood: infant sleep, developmental agendas, temperament, preschools, academic success, and learning to be a parent in a new cultural environment. The authors use a varied of methods -- qualitative and quantitative -- to understand how parental figures in Botswana, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United States think about the needs of their children, their own role as parents, and the caretaking practices that follow. A final Commentary focuses on the power of parental ethnotheories in changing societies, and on the complexities and importance of cross-cultural research.

This paper explains various good practices and perspectives of Early Childhood Education across the nation. A good number of reviews across the globe has collected from various sources, research projects, PhD thesis and so on which put categorized as knowledge base, developmentally appropriate practice, observation and assessment, positive behavior guidance, inclusive practices, personal professional development. The research mainly focused on the pedagogical process, language development, social and cultural perspectives of preschools. Theses good practices also implemented and recommended at national level of those nations to their preschool/ Early Childhood Education Curriculum policies.

Integration of teaching protocol is an original creation of China's basic education. This model emphasizes the balance between the student as the subject and the teacher as the dominant. "Target-Guided Teaching" refers to the use of target guidance strategy to improve teaching, enabling students to effectively use information tools and resources to improve their learning and adapt to social development. This paper studies the target guidance model based on the integration of teaching protocol. After analyzing the early studies, we defined the concepts related to the target guidance model based on the teaching protocol, and elaborated on the strategies for determining learning and using goals for the reference of front-line education workers.

The body is the very basis of children's self-growth and their understanding of the world. However, children's body experiences of growing up have rarely been studied. This paper uses a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to study the body experience of 35 kindergarten children aged 5-6 from Nanjing, China. We found that children's body experiences can be grouped into two themes: the experience of body through physical changes, that is, children's experience of their physical changes; and the experience of body through actions, that is, children's experience of using their bodies to learn different skills and knowledge. Children's body experiences are multi-dimensional, ambivalent, and socially interactive throughout different events growing up. Even the same event involves multiple and contradictory experiences, which are influenced by both internal and external sources. Suggestions are discussed to address the problem of children's body experiences being neglected by adults.

Although abundant evidence demonstrates that play is the source of development for preschool-aged children in various cultures, few studies have investigated the role of adult-children collective play in supporting the development of children in institutional care settings. This study examined whether and how a play-based programme created developmental opportunities for children in an orphanage in China. The focus child, Shanshan (pseudonym), three years and seven months old, was observed in the natural setting of an orphanage. Relevant to this paper, digital video observations and fieldnotes were used for data collection. The cultural-historical concepts of play and the social situation of child development were used to analyse how Shanshan changed through a ten-week intervention. Findings suggest that even within a short period of time, the implementation of collective play changed the social situation for the child in institutional care, and had considerable impact on the child's play development and engagement. This study contributes to understanding how collective play can act as an effective intervention strategy for children in institutional care.

The notion of learning dispositions has extended conceptions of learning in early childhood education to incorporate dimensions such as habits of mind and patterns of behaviour. This paper conceptualizes learning dispositions through a Chinese lens, and with conceptualizing this notion, explores associated pedagogical practices. The data are drawn from the field notes in an early childhood classroom and focus group interviews with sixteen early childhood teachers and three early childhood experts. The evidence indicates that disposition is an essential component on the participants' construction of children's learning as well as a deliberate focus of teachers' teaching. However, it is also revealed that children's learning dispositions are something of paradox, offering the potential of a learner-centred pedagogy and yet are grounded in teaching plans, prescribed goals and specific activities. Findings interrogate the positioning of learning dispositions in relation to the wider discourse of children's learning in the Chinese early childhood context.

In 2001, China's moral education curriculum reform called for a "returning to life" as a radical shift from its previous empty sermonic pedagogy, hoping to cultivate its twenty-first century children into ethical humans. Accordingly, a notion of "human ecology" appeared in the post-2001 textbook design, which became "co-being with" in the latest 2016 textbook redesign. This paper picks up this "co-being with" as a philosophical, ethical, and ecological notion and scrutinizes its relevance to the discursive construction of China's moral child in two steps. First, it draws upon Heidegger's thinking and the Chinese Daoist ecological understanding to explicate the philosophical significance of this "co-being with" for moral education. Second, it unpacks the discursive embodiments of this ethical-ecological "co-being" with in connection with the construction of moral subjects in the post-2001 and 2016 textbooks. Through rigorous textual analysis, this paper finds that the post-2001 textbook discourses embody an instrumental trope and a subject vs object binary style of reasoning, which possibly makes egoistic rather than ethical children. The 2016 textbook discourses, especially those on the theme of "co-being with," however, constrain the above instrumentality and envision cultivating ethical children. This paper argues this theorized "co-being with" provides some implications for moral education in China and the world, meanwhile raising some pedagogical challenges as well.

The practice of integrating songs into educational research is seen as an emerging phenomenon, focusing on students' existential situation from the perspective of culture. This paper explores the connections between the songs selected and children's life experiences in different periods between the 1950s and the present. There exist numerous songs involving the theme of schoolbags over the past 70 years. In 14 typical popular songs, the cultural implications of schoolbags roughly fall into four categories, namely political, emotional, playful, and visionary, each respectively reflecting different degrees of weight captured by the song originators. Accompanied by the diversity of musical rhythms and melodies, the musical images of schoolbags may vary in terms of phenomenology and schooling culture. The nature of schoolbags in songs keeps changing, closely related to the micro-political experiences of the singers. Therefore, as a teaching resource outside the classroom, popular songs exert a greater influence on students' spiritual cultivation than formal knowledge.

Starting from the influence of Chinese traditional reading culture on contemporary Chinese family education, this paper analyzes the reasons for the formation of the “involution” of Chinese family education. The involution means to have fierce competition but no good feedbacks. This study found that the objective reasons include China's national education policy, and the subjective reasons come from the current family education; there are problems such as incomplete awareness of parents' education, lack of educational ability, education comparison and so on. It is proposed that the correct values and competition views should be cultivated among family members so that parents can take the initiative to break the barriers of education and promote the all around development and healthy growth of children. This article focuses on the role of family education and the educational methods to prevent “involution”, which may provide another way for China's family education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prenatal exposures to toxic metals and trace elements have been linked to childhood neurodevelopment. However, existing evidence remains inconclusive, and further research is needed to investigate the mixture effects of multiple metal exposures on childhood neurodevelopment. We aimed to examine the associations between prenatal exposure to specific metals and metal mixtures and neurodevelopment in children. In this prospective cohort study, we used the multivariable linear regressions and the robust modified Poisson regressions to explore the associations of prenatal exposure to 25 specific metals with neurodevelopment among children at 3 years of age in 854 mother-child pairs from the Jiangsu Birth Cohort (JBC) Study. The Bayesian kernel machine regression (BKMR) was employed to assess the joint effects of multiple metals on neurodevelopment. Prenatal manganese (Mn) exposure was negatively associated with the risk of non-optimal cognition development of children, while vanadium (V), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), antimony (Sb), cerium (Ce) and uranium (U) exposures were positively associated with the risk of non-optimal gross motor development. BKMR identified an interaction effect between Sb and Ce on non-optimal gross motor development. Additionally, an element risk score (ERS), representing the mixture effect of multiple metal exposures including V, Cu, Zn, Sb, Ce and U was constructed based on weights from a Poisson regression model. Children with ERS in the highest tertile had higher probability of non-optimal gross motor development (RR = 2.37, 95 % CI: 1.15, 4.86) versus those at the lowest tertile. Notably, Sb [conditional-posterior inclusion probabilities (cPIP) = 0.511] and U (cPIP = 0.386) mainly contributed to the increased risk of non-optimal gross motor development. The findings highlight the importance of paying attention to the joint effects of multiple metals on children's neurodevelopment. The ERS score may serve as an indicator of comprehensive metal exposure risk for children's neurodevelopment., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In a time when story-acting practices have gained increasing focus, little is known about the relations between family story acting and a child's interactions with the ideal models represented in stories. Drawing upon a cultural-historical perspective of play and development, this study is aimed at discovering how a child is able to interact with the conceptual models usually formed in stories such as "sharing" during family dramatic play. The case study reported in this paper related to a three-year-old child and the parents from Mainland China. A total 25.15 hours of video observations and interviews was collected over 16 family visits during 2 research periods. Findings suggested that a shared imaginary situation created during the co-construction of a play-world between a child and his/her parents had its importance in fostering the child's active explorations of the ideal descriptions of certain conceptual rules. A new interpretation of the play-world can be made considering the pretend form made in a play-world, which acts as a bridge between a child's real state of conceptual understanding and the ideal form of the concept described in a story-world.

This paper reviews the development of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in China. The historical context from 1900 is summarised, and then developments from the 1980s up to the present kindergarten expansion movement, starting in 2010, are covered in detail. The review shows that ECEC development in China has undergone great changes both in policy and practice. The clash between progressive ideas and existing kindergarten practices has been and remains a challenge. The "cultural appropriateness issue" is of concern, and there are strong voices for keeping valuable aspects of Chinese traditional culture. China has put great efforts recently into boosting kindergarten participation nationwide; yet, there have been and remain great social economic disparities at various levels. There is also growing concern that the programme quality cannot be maintained with the rapid kindergarten expansion process. Policy development for the childcare sector (0-3) in China is relatively thin compared to recent booms for kindergartens.

With the increasing investment in education in China, higher education institutions have higher requirements for the introduction of teachers. This research mainly discusses the development and training strategies of college teachers based on data mining technology. Data mining technology is dedicated to data analysis and understanding, and the technology of revealing the information contained in the data. It is a frontier research topic in the field of information and database technology. Therefore, the system of monitoring and evaluation of college teaching quality based on data mining is designed for the management of educational affairs in colleges provided convenience. This paper selects an unsupervised classification method: a cluster analysis. This method can not only obtain reasonable classification results but also give consideration to the comprehensiveness of employee development and give reasonable development suggestions for each employee through classification results. For a series of introduced teacher's information, personnel management module should provide the following functions: teacher information management, contract information management, resignation information management, and query teacher personnel information. The recruitment management module often collects the candidate information, registers and stores it, and then conducts a series of personnel screening for these candidates according to the recruitment criteria, and finally determines the possible candidates. Afterwards, a series of comprehensive evaluations are carried out on these selected candidates, and finally the candidates are selected for admission based on the comprehensive performance of the candidates. The K-means clustering algorithm in the cluster analysis method is adopted. This algorithm has the excellent characteristics of high computational efficiency and is suitable for the operation of large amount of data. Through the clustering algorithm, a reasonable assessment method is established, and it is effectively used in the human resources assessment management system. Among the introduced teachers, the number of teachers whose professional title is high, the highest degree is doctorate, and the number of teachers whose papers are published at SCI level accounts for 16%. The data tested by the data mining tool contains 1,400 rows of data. The minimum support is 5%, and the minimum confidence is 90%. This study is helpful for the rational planning of human resources and the promotion of comprehensive competitiveness of colleges and universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines outcomes associated with participation in short-term, international internship experiences. Results suggest short-term international internship experiences contribute to rich personal and professional development outcomes. Findings highlight participant challenges associated with initial internship experiences, professional growth in teaching skills and strategies, and personal growth in confidence, flexibility, and coping skills. Multicultural competencies and program-level learning goals were also supported through the international internship experience.

With the development of society, the number of autistic children in China is increasing, which not only makes the family's happiness very low, but also seriously affects the development of teenagers and society. Among the symptoms of autistic children, early childhood communication skills have received extensive attention. In traditional rehabilitation training, with a lack of parents' participation, most of the training cannot arouse the interest of autistic children, so the treatment effect is not obvious. Based on this, this paper proposes the application of family sports games to improve the early communication ability of autistic children. This article aims to investigate the role of family sports games in promoting the development of early communication skills in autistic children. This paper uses the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to score the comprehensive ability of family sports games. The experimental results of this paper show that before the experiment, the comprehensive scores of children's communication ability in the control group and the experimental group were 18.92 and 18, respectively, which were generally low, and there was no significant difference. This shows that the communication skills of the two groups of children before the experiment are relatively poor. After the test, the children's comprehensive score of communication ability in the experimental group increased by 35.8 points, and the difference was significant, indicating that family sports games have a great impact on the development of children's communication ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the comprehension of long and short passives in 15 Mandarin preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4;2–5;11 years), 15 Typically Developing Age-matched (TDA) (aged 4;3–5;8 years) children, and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) (aged 3;2–4;3 years) children by using the picture-sentence matching task. The results reveal that children with DLD encounter more difficulty comprehending long passives compared with short passive, that they perform worse on the comprehension task than TDA children and TDY children, and that this population is more likely to commit thematic role reversal errors and point to pictures with the incorrect agent (patient) than typically developing children. Given that Mandarin passives are Topic Structures, we maintain that children with DLD are insensitive to the edge feature of the moved element in long passives, leading to Relativized Minimality effect and causing the asymmetry between the comprehension of long and short passives. These results align well with the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis. Errors found in the children with DLD in the comprehension task point toward impaired syntactic knowledge and the lexical semantic deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone age assessment (BAA) is a typical clinical technique for diagnosing endocrine and metabolic diseases in children's development. Existing deep learning-based automatic BAA models are trained on the Radiological Society of North America dataset (RSNA) from Western populations. However, due to the difference in developmental process and BAA standards between Eastern and Western children, these models cannot be applied to bone age prediction in Eastern populations. To address this issue, this paper collects a bone age dataset based on the East Asian populations for model training. Nevertheless, it is laborious and difficult to obtain enough X-ray images with accurate labels. In this paper, we employ ambiguous labels from radiology reports and transform them into Gaussian distribution labels of different amplitudes. Furthermore, we propose multi-branch attention learning with ambiguous labels network (MAAL-Net). MAAL-Net consists of a hand object location module and an attention part extraction module to discover the informative regions of interest (ROIs) based only on image-level labels. Extensive experiments on both the RSNA dataset and the China Bone Age (CNBA) dataset demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-arts, and performs on par with experienced physicians in children's BAA tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Delayed child skill development is a common phenomenon in low- and middle-income countries. Effective and low-cost strategies suitable for application to less-developed countries are needed. We summarize empirical findings from recent papers that study a replication of the Jamaica Reach Up and Learn home visiting program in China, China REACH, and compare child skill growth profiles in the China Reach Up and Jamaica interventions., Methods: Different interventions often use different measures for assessing early childhood skill development. To estimate the growth of underlying skills across programs, we address the challenge that different programs use different assessments. We use a modified version of the Rasch model to anchor scores on common items to estimate skill development., Results: Language skill growth curves are comparable for both interventions. This pattern is consistent for the treatment and control groups across the interventions. Skill growth curves are not statistically significantly different between China REACH and Jamaican interventions. We find evidence of the importance of early investment., Conclusions: The China REACH intervention significantly improves the development of multiple skills. At the same ages, treatment effect sizes and skill growth curves are comparable across the Jamaica and China REACH interventions, despite differences in scale and cultural settings. The scale of the program is much greater in China than in Jamaica, showing that the Jamaican curriculum can be effectively expanded to larger populations. Annual costs per child are roughly $500 (2015 US dollars)., (Copyright © 2023 by the American Academy of Pediatrics.)

Objective. Under the background of the policy of caring for the healthy growth of left-behind children, the purpose of selecting the topic is to study some common negative emotional problems of left-behind children in rural areas, focusing on the guidance of negative emotions of left-behind children in rural areas. In emotional problems, we analyze and find out the reasons for these negative emotions through observation and research. Method. In this paper, a platform for acquiring emotional semantic data of scene images in an open behavioral experimental environment is designed, which breaks the limitations of time and place, and thus acquires a large amount of emotional semantic data of scene images and then uses principal component analysis to evaluate the validity of the data analysis. Psychological testing was used to measure parent-child affinity, adversity beliefs, and positive/negative emotion scales, respectively, to examine children whose parents went out, children whose fathers went out, and non-left-behind children. The characteristics of parent-child affinity, adversity beliefs, and positive/negative emotions in three types of children were examined, and the direct predictive effects of parent-child affinity and adversity beliefs on the positive/negative emotions of the three types of children were examined. Results/Discussion. Adversity beliefs played a partial mediating role between children's parent-child bonding and positive emotions. The predictive effect of adversity beliefs on children's emotional adaptation differs by emotional type. The main effects of the left-behind category were significant for both positive and negative emotions. The gender main effect of negative emotion was significant, and the negative emotion level of girls was significantly higher than that of boys. The main effect of the left-behind category of adversity beliefs was significant, and the adversity belief levels of children whose parents went out to rural areas were significantly lower than those of children whose fathers went out and non-left-behind children. The negative emotions generated by left-behind children in rural areas are channeled, and to a certain extent, they are improved and alleviated. Through the emotional counseling and improvement of the rural left-behind children in the research site in the article, the service objects can have better emotions, promote mental health, make them happy and grow up healthily, and also provide a certain theory for the establishment of the local left-behind children care system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses novel experimental data from a prototypical early childhood home visiting program in China with high-frequency measurements to investigate the growth of multiple skills. After identifying the presence of child skill development on multiple skills during the intervention, we further study the features of child learning patterns. We find that individual heterogeneity and previous task performance (state dependence) are key properties of the child's task performance during the intervention, consistent with models of reinforcement learning., (© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Community Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

This paper provides a composite analysis of children's academic development grounded on the capability approach. The study utilises a panel dataset comprising 8,422 Chinese children and adolescents aged 6 to 16, observed between 2012 and 2018. It introduces a series of innovative indicators, including a parent advantage index to capture how parents influence their children and a ranking indicator for spending priorities to reify the value of children's education that families have reasoned. To address unobserved heterogeneity, we adopted fixed-effects models, multilevel modelling, and heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variables. Our primary results show that a 1% increase in the parent advantage index yields an increase of 13.85% to 21.31% in children's academic development, and the biggest leap in prioritising education-relevant spending increases the child outcomes by 2.88% to 6.57%. By highlighting the influence of parents' beings and doings, particularly the value they assign to education, this research contributes to the existing literature on child development, which often focuses predominantly on material dimensions. In sum, it expands the frontiers of the capability approach and related research on parental practices. It offers novel insights into how policies can be reinforced to equalise educational opportunities and to boost human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Objectives: Muscle health is essential for children's physical development and future health. PPARGC1A gene encode the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor coactivator 1α which coactivates transcription factors that control mediating skeletal muscle fiber type conversion and skeletal muscle fiber formation. The PPARGC1A rs8192678 Gly/Ser (Gly482Ser) polymorphism was associated with the regulation of skeletal muscle fibre type. This paper aims to explore the association between the PPARGC1A rs8192678 (Gly482Ser) polymorphism and muscle fitness in Chinese schoolchildren. Methods: We detected the distribution of the PPARGC1A rs8192678 (Gly482Ser) polymorphism by DNA typing of saliva samples from untrained Southern Chinese Han children aged 7–12 years. Considering that muscle studies in children cannot use invasive sampling, we analyzed the association between alleles and genotypes with high validity tests of muscle fitness assesment in children(handgrip strength, standing long jump, sit-ups and push-ups). Results: The results showed no significant differences in height, weight or body mass index between the sexes. The grip strength indicators were correlated with age in boys and height and weight in girls. Sit-ups were significantly higher in girls with the PPARGC1A Gly/Gly genotype than in boys, and handgrip strength and standing long jump were significantly lower in girls with the PPARGC1A rs8192678 (Gly482Ser) genotype than in boys. Genetic model analysis showed that the Gly482 allele had a dominant genetic effect on the Gly482 allele is hypothesized to influence the expression of type I fibers in skeletal muscle in girls, while the Ser482 allele affects on type II fibers in girls. The two alleles had little genetic effect on boys. Conclusions: The results suggested the possible association of the PPARGC1A rs8192678 (Gly482Ser) polymorphism on myofibril type-related phenotypes in Han Chinese children in southern China, with a particular impact on girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive ability is an important aspect of children's development, but there is still room for discussion about the impact of preschool education on children's cognitive ability. Based on the data of China Urbanization and Children Development Survey (CUCDS) of Tsinghua University, this paper categorizes cognitive ability into Chinese language cognition and mathematical cognition. It is discovered that the impact of preschool education on children's cognitive development differs depending on the cognitive ability and the length of time. In particular, preschool education has both short-term and long-term effects on children's Chinese cognitive ability, while there is only a short-term effect on the development of children's mathematical cognitive ability without long-term effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of parental beliefs on child development outcomes (for both cognitive and social−emotional skills) based on a three-wave longitudinal survey in rural China. The survey waves were conducted when the sample children were 18−30 months, 22−36 months, and 49−65 months, respectively. A total of 815 children and their primary caregivers who participated in all three wave surveys were enrolled in this study. Using difference-in-differences and propensity score matching approaches, the results indicate that strengthened parental beliefs have a positive and significant impact on child social−emotional development. Specifically, between the periods of the Wave 1 survey (when children were 18−30 months old) and the Wave 3 survey (when children were 49−65 months old), and between the Wave 2 survey (when children were 22−36 months old) and the Wave 3 survey, strengthened parental beliefs were causally associated with more favorable child social−emotional scores by 0.44 SD (p < 0.01) and 0.49 SD (p < 0.01), respectively. No significant impact, however, was found between the period of the Wave 1 survey and the Wave 2 survey. In contrast, weakened parental beliefs had a negative and significant impact on child social−emotional development. Specifically, weakened parental beliefs were causally associated with worse child social−emotional abilities by 0.35 SD (p < 0.01), 0.30 SD (p < 0.01), and 0.22 (p < 0.05) for the time period of the Wave 1 to Wave 2, Wave 1 to Wave 3, and Wave 2 to Wave 3, respectively. No significant impact of parental beliefs, however, was found on child cognitive development. In addition, the findings of the mediation analysis show that only a marginal impact of parental beliefs on child social−emotional development can be indirectly explained by parental beliefs through parenting practices. This study calls on policy makers to improve parental beliefs and parenting practices in the hope that it will lead to better child development in rural China.

The vulnerable children refer to the special group of children with deviation in the process of children's psychological development and personality formation due to growth dilemmas. This may incur a series of serious social and family problems. The vulnerable children mainly cover the children suffering from children's psychological problems, such as childhood autism, autism, social anxiety and hypersensitivity, fear, depression, and PTSD arising from other factors. At present, the research results at home and abroad mainly focus on the psychological dynamic correlation investigation and solution discussion of a certain kind of difficult factor in the children's psychological development based on statistical data by the experimental methods, such as scale and model, and there is a blind spot in the humanistic orientation theory construction of psychological treatment for vulnerable children, causing the social reflection on children's psychological predicament from the humanistic perspective cannot be performed in related researches and going against searching for universal and integral theoretical paradigm for solving related problems. Sophisticated technologies for the observations have emerged increasingly for enabling the psychological features of vulnerable children through developmental cognitive neuroscience experiments. This paper introduces humanistic art therapy theory, focuses on the construction of a theoretical paradigm, and verifies its effectiveness based on the experimental results on the psychological development of vulnerable children, with an efficient performance. This study mainly refers to children with difficulty in social inclusion and psychological development. The results showed that two kinds of art therapy can obviously improve the psychological disorders of vulnerable children. The goal was to enhance self-cognition, strengthen emotional interaction, and implement positive motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's fast-developing urbanization has promoted a great number of rural families migrating to urban areas. The objective of this study is to address the existing situation of urban migrant parents' parenting for infant and toddlers and the association between co-parental self-efficacy and child developmental outcomes. A sample of 387 parents of rural–urban migrant families in urban China was invited to complete the online questionnaires. Results showed that mothers have higher parenting self-efficacy (PSE) levels than fathers in all measured dimensions, and found an interdependence of their co-PSE predicting child development outcomes. This study revealed that rural–urban migrant families were still following Chinese traditional parenting and attributed mothers to the responsibility for early childcare, although the ensuing modernization and ingress of Western values have greatly influenced urban parents' understandings about parenting. Based on these results, this paper provides implications for intervention approaches to promote PSE among migrant parents with young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Zoomorphism, an obverse of conventional anthropomorphism, has been shown in many cases to be a powerful tool with respect to the metaphorical use of animals. Objectives: This study introduced zoomorphism into the instructional video design of pedagogical agents (PAs). Method: We first developed three image sets, each of which corresponded to a type of zoomorphic PA image construct (full panda, a human face with a panda body, and a human body with panda head imagery). Then, we conducted an image‐screening experiment in which 177 second‐grade students from a primary school were asked to select their favourite PA image for each image construct set. We used a realistic human PA as the baseline. Next, 114 second‐grade students from another school were randomly assigned to learn instructional videos on the topic of pandas using a PA with one of four imageries. Results and Conclusions: ANOVA and Kruskal–Wallis tests indicated that students presented with PAs with full‐panda imagery achieved significantly higher learning performance, learning experience, social presence, and learning interest than those presented with other imageries of PAs. The regression results showed that the effect of zoomorphic PAs with full‐panda imagery on learning performance was exerted in a direct way and that its effect on learning experience was mediated by social presence and learning interest. Implications: Our findings suggest that zoomorphic appearance is an essential quality for video learning that merits further investigation for the efficient imagery construction of PAs. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: The inclusion of pedagogical agents with images that are attributed human qualities to animals known as anthropomorphism is very popular in multimedia education; however, the existing studies on the effects of such images on learning have shown inconsistent results. What this paper adds: We introduced the alternative philosophy of animal use‐zoomorphism, which is the obverse of anthropomorphism, into agent image building. Implications for practice and/or policy: Our study demonstrated that the zoomorphism of agent images increases learning performance and experience; thus, our findings suggest the prospect of zoomorphism in the development of agent image patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Over the past decade, the call to foster computational thinking (CT) in every child has received considerable attention. However, there is little understanding of whether children are developmentally ready to think computationally and what specific CT concepts and skills can be developed at various ages. This study explored the developmental and gender differences in CT skills of 197 Grade 4–6 students (aged 9–13) before being exposed to instruction and investigated the age–gender interaction effects on their CT acquisition in an intervention combining both programming and non‐programming (unplugged) activities. Results show that students' CT skills followed a developmental progression before instruction. Gender difference across ages was insignificant in conditionals, logical operators, pattern recognition and generalization skills. Additionally, students of different ages developed CT differently during the intervention, and their CT acquisition was unaffected by gender. Implications for practice and research in CT education were discussed. Lay Description: What is currently known about the topic: Learning progressions for computational thinking have been defined in K‐12 curricula globally.Engaging in programming and non‐programming (unplugged) activities can increase students' CT skills.Controversial results have been reported on the age–gender interaction effects on CT development.Lack of understanding on children's actual progressive development of CT. What this paper adds: A developmental progression was found in CT skills of students aged 9–13. Students aged 12 and above had some a priori understanding of CT.No gender difference across ages existed in conditionals, logical operators, pattern recognition and generalization skills before instruction.Students aged 9–11 benefitted the most from an intervention combining both programming and unplugged activities compared to older students. Students' CT acquisition in the intervention was unaffected by gender.Given the intervention, students aged 9 and above developed conditionals, logical operators and pattern recognition skills. However, generalization skill was developed only for students aged 12 and above. Implications for practice and policy: The findings lay the foundation for designing evidence‐based age‐appropriate CT learning progression and pedagogies.Age‐appropriate learning content: Given appropriate learning experiences, students aged 9 and above may be ready to learn certain CT concepts and skills, including conditionals, logical operators and pattern recognition.CT pedagogies: Using programming and unplugged activities to develop CT requires careful consideration of students' cognitive development and gender needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has found that there are high rates of mental health problems among caregivers in rural China and that caregiver mental health may be a significant predictor of developmental delays among infants and toddlers in these rural areas. In this paper, we use data from a survey of 986 caregiver-child pairs in rural China to examine the risk factors of caregiver mental health and measure the association between caregiver mental health and child development outcomes. To conduct the empirical analysis, we assess caregiver mental health using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (DASS-21) questionnaire and measure child developmental outcomes using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Developmental Third Edition (Bayley-III). The results show that 32% of caregivers have depressive symptoms, 42% have anxiety symptoms, and 30% have symptoms of stress. The data also demonstrate that caregiver identity and age as well as different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) (characterized by caregiver education, father's education, and household wealth) are all significantly linked to symptoms of caregiver mental health problems. The analysis shows that caregiver depression, anxiety, and/or stress are significantly associated with lower early childhood development (ECD) outcomes in all areas measured (cognition, language, social-emotion, and motor skills). The heterogeneous analysis demonstrates that there are differences in the effects of caregiver mental health problems on ECD among households are from families that are endowed with different levels of SES. On the basis of the findings the study concludes that policymakers should pay more attention to caregiver mental health problems in order to improve child developmental outcomes in rural China. The study cannot, however, draw casual conclusions and cannot rule out the possibility of recall bias when measuring caregiver mental health, which may limit the external validity of the findings.

Parental care in early childhood is viewed as one of the most important factors that help foster children's abilities. Using two nationally representative datasets collected in China, this paper examines the effects of parental absence on the short-term in-school outcomes and long-term educational achievement of left-behind children. The results show that parental absence is negatively associated with the development of left-behind children. Left-behind children have a lower cognitive test score and academic test score, and they are also less likely to attend a college. In particular, a mother's absence seems to have persistent negative effects on children's development. Mechanism analyses show that parental absence may result in a less healthy mental status of children and reduce children's efforts in class. However, we do not find significant evidence that the exposure to left-behind children in class lowers the in-school outcomes of children.

A growing body of literature has documented that community-based early childhood development (ECD) interventions can improve child developmental outcomes in vulnerable communities. One critical element of effective community-based programs is consistent program participation. However, little is known about participation in community-based ECD interventions or factors that may affect participation. This paper examines factors linked to program participation within a community-based ECD program serving 819 infants and their caregivers in 50 rural villages in northwestern China. The results find that more than half of families did not regularly attend the ECD program. Both village-level social ties within the program and proximity to the program significantly predict program participation. Increased distance from the program site is linked with decreased individual program participation, while the number of social ties is positively correlated with participation. The average program participation rates among a family's social ties is also positively correlated with individual participation, indicating strong peer effects. Taken together, our findings suggest that attention should be given to promoting social interactions and reducing geographic barriers among households in order to raise participation in community-based ECD programs., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This paper studied the interrelationships between parenting information, family care, and early childhood development (ECD) outcomes. A total of 1787 sample households in rural China were enrolled in a cross-sectional study. A demographic questionnaire, a parenting information questionnaire, the Family Care Indicators (FCIs), and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development version III (BSID-III) were used to measure demographic characteristics, parenting information that the caregiver received, family care, and early development outcomes of the child, respectively. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was then used to estimate the interrelationships. The results showed that family care significantly mediated between parenting information and ECD outcomes. Through family care, one standard deviation (SD) increase in the parenting information was associated with the increase in the child's four development outcomes (cognition, language, motor, and social-emotion) by 3%, 4%, 4%, and 5% of one SD, respectively. Different measurements of parenting information and different components of family care played different roles in the interrelationships. The key findings of this study are informative for providing early child development services in rural China.

A growing body of literature is providing evidence of a negative association between parental migration and child development. Meanwhile, the chain of relationships between parental migration, home environment, and early child development has not yet been well documented in China. This paper investigates the interrelationships between parental migration, home environment, and early child development in an undeveloped area of western rural China. In total, 444 households were included in the study. Bayley Scales of Infant Development version III (BSID-III), Home Observation Measurement of the Environment (HOME), and a socioeconomic questionnaire, were used to measure children's development outcomes, home environment, and socioeconomic characteristics in sample households. A mediation effect model was used to estimate the interrelationships between parental migration, home environment, and child development. The results demonstrate that home environment works as a significant mediator, through which parental migration is associated with a 0.07 standard deviation (SD), 0.13 SD, 0.12 SD, and 0.10 SD decline in the child's cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional scores, respectively. For future studies, the key findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving the home environments of left-behind children might be necessary in rural China.

This paper investigates the relationships between caregivers' parenting knowledge and early childhood development, based on a survey conducted in 1715 rural households in 100 villages located in an undeveloped rural area of western China. The results find that, first, caregivers' parenting knowledge is positively and significantly associated with children's development outcomes, including cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional development; second, caregivers' parental investments significantly mediate the link between parenting knowledge and early childhood development; third, in contrast with other parental investments, play materials (in terms of variety and quantity) and play activities in the households are the strongest mediators. Our findings might be informative for policy makers to design policies targeted to foster human capital formation in rural China.

This paper empirically investigates the relationships between caregivers' parenting skills and early cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional development of children aged 6-24 months. The study is based on data from a survey conducted in 100 villages in a typical poor rural area in western China. A total of 1715 households were enrolled in the study. In the study, Parent and Family Adjustment Scales (PAFAS), Bayley Scales of Infant Development version III (BSID-III), and a socioeconomic questionnaire were used to measure caregiver's parenting skills, child's development outcomes, and socioeconomic characteristics in sample households, respectively. Multivariate regression was used to estimate the relationship between a caregiver's parenting skills and the child's development outcomes. The results show that, first, parenting skills are positively and significantly associated with children's cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional development, and the link between parenting skills and social-emotional development is the strongest; second, the correlation between parenting skills and development outcomes varies across socioeconomic characteristics and parenting skill dimensions. The results provide evidence for the relationship between parenting skills and early childhood development in rural households in western China. Our findings also suggest that interventions aimed at improving caregivers' parenting skills during the early stages are necessary for human capital development in rural China.

This paper examines whether childcare choice affects the early childhood development of children aged 7–59 months. Using the data from Chinese Family Panel Studies, we look at household choices between parental and grandparental cares and the timing of four key early life achievements – walking, talking, counting and toilet training. We conceptualize early childhood development within a household production model, which enables us to identify the impacts of childcare. Our results suggest that compared with parental care, grandparental care delays the achievement of all four outcome measures. Grandparental care is particularly disadvantageous for children who are 'left‐behind' by migrant parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding emotions based on false beliefs is a necessary component of theory of mind. Previous research has indicated a lag in children's understanding of belief-based emotions as compared to false beliefs. Experiment 1 involved 83 Chinese 3- to 5-year-old children who were tested for the developmental change of the belief-emotion lag. Experiment 1 identified a lag effect in 3- and 4-year-olds who had better performance at the false belief task than the belief-based emotion understanding task. To further examine the potential influence of material familiarity on the lag, 27 3-year-old children participated in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds performed slightly better in the belief-based emotion understanding task when familiar materials were replaced by unfamiliar materials. A possible reason for the diminished level of the lag effect was discussed in light of children's emotional arousal. The findings have practical implications for implementing social and emotional learning programmes that foster young children's theory of mind understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OBJECTIVES: Delayed child skill development is a common phenomenon in low- and middle-income countries. Effective and low-cost strategies suitable for application to less-developed countries are needed. We summarize empirical findings from recent papers that study a replication of the Jamaica Reach Up and Learn home visiting program in China, China REACH, and compare child skill growth profiles in the China Reach Up and Jamaica interventions. METHODS: Different interventions often use different measures for assessing early childhood skill development. To estimate the growth of underlying skills across programs, we address the challenge that different programs use different assessments. We use a modified version of the Rasch model to anchor scores on common items to estimate skill development. RESULTS: Language skill growth curves are comparable for both interventions. This pattern is consistent for the treatment and control groups across the interventions. Skill growth curves are not statistically significantly different between China REACH and Jamaican interventions. We find evidence of the importance of early investment. CONCLUSIONS: The China REACH intervention significantly improves the development of multiple skills. At the same ages, treatment effect sizes and skill growth curves are comparable across the Jamaica and China REACH interventions, despite differences in scale and cultural settings. The scale of the program is much greater in China than in Jamaica, showing that the Jamaican curriculum can be effectively expanded to larger populations. Annual costs per child are roughly $500 (2015 US dollars). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the Chinese General Social Survey 2006 and 2008 data, this paper assesses the influence of the family planning policy on the qualitative development of children using education attainment and individual income of only children versus children with siblings as parameters. Our results show the following: (1) only children are better-educated than their counterparts with siblings; (2) only children earn higher income in comparison to their counterparts with siblings; (3) the income and education gaps between girls with and without siblings are greater than those between boys; (4) the education gaps between only children and children with siblings are greater for those born in the 1970s, but the income difference between only children and children with siblings is only significant for those born in the 1980s; and (5) the income and education gaps between only children and children with siblings are higher in urban regions. Results indicate that families with only one child invest more resources in children's quality under the family planning policy, which is consistent with the "quantity-quality trade-off" theory proposed by Gary Becker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the remarkable improvements that have been achieved in the field of child development in contemporary China, there remain daunting challenges. To explore and address these issues, we organize this special issue "Child development in contemporary China: Toward a multisystems perspective." In this collection, we introduce theoretically‐informed empirical research conducted by scholars worldwide and organize these research articles into four general themes: policy/program intervention regarding child development, migration status and child development, parenting/grandparenting and child development, and school/after‐school engagement and child development. These articles keep abreast of theoretical, methodological, and practical innovations in the field, aiming to provide new evidence to enrich the understanding of the patterns and potential mechanisms that would lead to a (dis)advantaged childhood in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transition to school lays the foundation for development of children throughout the school year. It is a research topic of interest across many countries including China. Extant reviews on transition to school mainly addressed international research written in English, however, the major foci and research findings of Chinese research were not included. This review included 131 international studies and 113 Chinese studies on school readiness and transition to school, from 1999 to 2021, to identify major foci and findings of both international and Chinese research on this topic. A considerable of overlap of foci and consistent findings between international and Chinese transition research were found in this review. The unique focus of Chinese research on psychological pressure of children in transition to school and its implication were discussed. Differences of methods adopted in international and Chinese studies were identified. Conclusions about the trends and future research directions are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Social-emotional ability is key to the well-being and future success of children; however, disparities in social-emotional development during an individual's early age can last a lifetime, which is particularly evident among children living in poverty-stricken areas. We aimed to determine the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and feasibility of a group-based intervention called the Care Group on social-emotional development for families living in poverty-stricken counties. Methods We conducted a cluster (township) randomized controlled trial (C-RCT) every two weeks from July 2019 to June 2020 in a poverty-stricken area located in Shanxi, China. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic suspended the implementation of the intervention in January 2020. The caregiver-child pairs in the intervention group participated in 12 group-based sessions with a structured curriculum and learning materials emphasizing nurturing ability and early childhood development. We applied a difference-in-differences (DID) model to estimate the intervention's impact. The analysis follows the intention-to-treat (ITT) principle. We used standard economic costing methods to estimate the cost of implementing the Care Group over the intervention period and adopted a societal perspective in the analysis. Results We included 322 eligible caregiver-child pairs in the baseline (intervention n=136, control n=186) and surveyed 258 pairs in the endline (intervention n=117, control n=141). Compared with the control group, children in the intervention group had significantly fewer social-emotional problems (adjusted mean difference of Z score=-0.374, 95% CI=-0.718, -0.030, P=0.033) six months after intervention. In the first year, the annual cost of implementing Care Group was US$146.10 per child, reduced to US$47.20 per child in the second year due to the exclusion of non-recurrent costs. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) was US$390.60. Conclusions Care Group is an effective approach for promoting children's social-emotional development in poverty-stricken areas at an affordable cost and with high feasibility for scale-up. Considering the planned per capita health expenditure of the Chinese government for 2022, we believe that the presented evidence makes a solid scientific and financial case for integrating the Care Group intervention into the basic public health services (BPHS) package. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates the causal effect of having siblings on the cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional skills of infants under the age of 2 in rural families in Guizhou Province in China. The results are based on data from a survey conducted in 2017. To effectively relieve the endogeneity induced by selection bias, we applied the matching-smoothing (MS) method to evaluate the effects of having siblings. The results show that, first, having siblings produces significant negative impacts on an infant's cognitive, language, and social-emotional skills; second, intrahousehold resource allocation is the mechanism behind the Quantity-Quality (Q-Q) trade-off, and it exerts its effects through two key identified channels-the home environment and parental warmth. By spreading the parents' investment among siblings in terms of both the home environment and parental warmth, having siblings hinders infants' early development. Our findings provide new evidence for the relation between the Q-Q trade-off and early childhood development in rural families in western China.