A series of studies investigated White U.S. three- and four-year-old children’s use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others’ relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which children shared their own preferences for various social activities. Four-year-old (but not younger) children attended to gender and racial category membership to guide inferences about others’ relationships, but did not use these categories to reason about others’ shared activity preferences. Taken together, the findings provide evidence for three suggestions about these children’s social category-based reasoning. First, gender is a more potent category than race. Second, social categories are initially recruited for first-person reasoning, but later become broad enough to support third-person inferences. Finally, at least for third-person reasoning, thinking about social categories is more attuned to social relationships than to shared attributes.

Researchers have suggested that as children’s language skill develops in early childhood, it comes to help children regulate their emotions (Cole, Armstrong, & Pemberton, 2010; Kopp, 1989), but the pathways by which this occurs have not been studied empirically. In a longitudinal study of 120 children from 18 to 48 months of age, associations among child language skill, observed anger expression, and regulatory strategies during a delay task were examined. Toddlers with better language skill, and whose language skill increased more over time, appeared less angry at 48 months and their anger declined more over time. Two regulatory strategies, support-seeking and distraction, explained a portion of the variance in the association between language skill and anger expression by 36 months.

Young children in foster care often experience adversity, such as maltreatment and lack of stability in early caregiving relationships. As a result, these children are at risk for a range of problems, including deficits in executive functioning. The Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up for Toddlers (ABC-T) intervention was designed to help foster parents behave in ways that promote the development of young children's emerging self-regulatory capabilities. Participants included 173 parent-toddler dyads in three groups: foster families that were randomly assigned to receive either the ABC-T intervention (n = 63) or a control intervention (n = 58), as well as low-risk parent-toddler dyads from intact families (n = 52). At a follow-up conducted when children were approximately 48 months old, children's executive functioning abilities were assessed with the attention problems scale of the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000) and a graded version of the Dimensional Change Card Sort developed for preschoolers (Beck, Schaefer, Pang, & Carlson, 2011). Results showed that foster children whose parents received the ABC-T intervention and low-risk children never placed in foster care had fewer parent-reported attention problems and demonstrated greater cognitive flexibility during the Dimensional Change Card Sort than foster children whose parents received the control intervention. These results indicate that an attachment-based intervention implemented among toddlers in foster care is effective in enhancing children's executive functioning capabilities.Children in foster care are at risk for negative developmental outcomes as the result of experiences of abuse, neglect, and unstable attachment relationships (Jackson, Gabrielli, Fleming, Tunno, & Makanui, 2014). In addition to the initial removal from their birth parents, children in foster care often experience repeated disruptions in their attachment relationships as they transition between multiple caregivers and placements (Dozier & Lindhiem, 2006;Sanchirico & Jablonka, 2000). As a result, foster children often struggle with effectively regulating their cognitions (Bernedo, Salas, Fuentes, & García-Martín, 2014;Tarren-Sweeney, 2008), emotions (Pears, Kim, Buchanan, & Fisher, 2015), behaviors (Clausen, Landsverk, Ganger, Chadwick, & Litrownik, 1998;Keller et al., 2001), and Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Mary Dozier, Department of Brain and Psychological Sciences, University of Delaware, 108 Wolf Hall, Newark, DE 19716; mdozier@udel.edu. (Bernard, Butzin-Dozier, Rittenhouse, & Dozier, 2010;Bruce, Fisher, Pears, & Levine, 2009). HHS Public AccessIn the United States, about 20% of children in foster care are between the ages of 1 and 3 years old (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2015). Children in this age group face several critical developmental tasks: establishing attachment relationships with caregivers (Sroufe, 2005), using attachment relationships to coregulate difficult emotions (Cassidy, 1994), and developi...

In this paper, we highlight issues we consider key to the development of an evidence-based intervention for the parents of young children who had experienced early adversity. The intervention was initially developed for foster infants, but adapted for infants living with their neglecting parents, then for young children adopted internationally, and finally for toddlers in foster care or living with neglecting birth parents. The intervention and its adaptations share a focus on the importance of providing nurturance to children when they are distressed, and following children's lead when they are not distressed. We approached intervention development from a theoretical position, with attachment theory and stress neurobiology central. But we are, at heart, clinical scientists and have been open to confirmation or disconfirmation of our ideas and hypotheses. In this paper, we describe our approach, discuss issues and challenges central to our work, and share advice for addressing similar issues and challenges.

Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) is a parenting program developed to enhance sensitivity among parents of infants who experience early adversity. In several randomized clinical trials, the intervention’s efficacy has been demonstrated. Moving interventions into the community with adequate fidelity is challenging, though, and intervention effects are often much smaller than when tested in randomized clinical trials. To enhance the likelihood that ABC is delivered with high fidelity, a micro-analytic fidelity assessment was developed. Using this fidelity tool as a central component of training, supervision, and certification, changes in parent sensitivity for 108 families with children ages 6 months to 2 years were as large as those seen in laboratory settings. These findings are discussed with regard to implications for moving other evidence-based interventions into the community.