Evi Petersen, Natália Meireles Santos da Costa, Tuva Beyer Broch
Emotional competence is often theorized as a set of individual capacities, while the cultural and institutional practices through which children learn to interpret, express, and regulate emotions receive less attention. This Perspective paper examines Norwegian friluftsliv (often translated to English as “open-air life,”) in early childhood education and care as a culturally situated setting of emotion socialization. We propose conceptualizing friluftsliv as an institutional emotion niche: a configuration of repeated routines, material environments, social relations, and normative expectations that makes particular emotional experiences more likely and particular expressions more readily recognized as competent. This creates a potential inclusion–exclusion paradox. Friluftsliv can foster joy in nature, mastery, endurance, and belonging, but these outcomes are not guaranteed. Children enter outdoor practices with different embodied histories, family practices, material resources, and sensory or physical needs. Hesitation, withdrawal, or discomfort may consequently be misrecognized as deficits rather than as meaningful responses to particular situations. We argue that children's emotional capacities must be distinguished from their institutional recognition and outline three directions for research: embodied environmental experiences, socialization into culturally valued emotional display rules, and identity formation and belonging through shared practices. By situating institutional outdoor practices with children as culturally organized emotion niches, this paper contributes with conceptual and thematic innovation to emotion research and outdoor studies and offers directions for professional practice that support multiple forms of meaningful outdoor participation.
The increasing integration of digital media into children's lives has raised concerns about possible associations between screen exposure and cognitive development. This narrative review synthesizes empirical evidence published from 2014 to 2025 on associations between screen exposure and attention, memory, executive function, and related developmental outcomes among school-aged children (6–11 years) and adolescents (12–18 years) and interprets the findings through Cognitive Load Theory. Searches of PubMed, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar were conducted in May 2025 and updated in June 2025. Following duplicate removal and screening by one reviewer, 13 empirical studies were included. The evidence encompassed cross-sectional, longitudinal, neuroimaging, and Mendelian randomization designs. Higher or poorly structured screen exposure was generally associated with attention difficulties, weaker working memory or executive function, academic challenges, and differences in brain regions involved in cognitive control. However, findings were not uniform: interactive, purposeful, and developmentally appropriate digital activities were sometimes associated with neutral or beneficial cognitive outcomes. Cognitive Load Theory offers a plausible interpretation in which rapid, distracting, or multitasked media increases extraneous cognitive load and leaves fewer working-memory resources for task-relevant processing and schema construction. Because most included studies were observational and screen exposure was measured inconsistently, the evidence does not establish that screen use directly causes cognitive impairment. Future research should use longitudinal or experimental designs, objective and multidimensional measures of digital use, and direct measures of cognitive load. Guidance for families and educators should consider content, context, timing, and purpose in addition to duration.
Jina Ahn, Erica A. Cartmill, Catherine M. Sandhofer
Children learn language in social environments shaped by interactions with caregivers and other adults. Prior research suggests that even brief familiarity with a social partner can facilitate some types of learning, but it remains unclear whether short-term familiarity influences children's word learning. Across two studies, we examined whether short-term familiarity with an experimenter affected children's performance on a novel-label generalization task. In Study 1, younger children (22–37 months) were taught and tested by an experimenter with whom they had completed a 10-min interactive free-play session or a different unfamiliar experimenter. Children performed similarly in the familiar and unfamiliar conditions, and a Bayes-factor analysis provided moderate evidence favoring no difference between conditions. In Study 2, older children (49–69 months) completed blocked training-testing with both familiar and unfamiliar experimenters and a resource-allocation measure of social preference. Children showed a social preference for the familiar experimenter, but their generalization performance did not differ significantly between experimenters; the Bayesian evidence regarding a familiarity effect was inconclusive, although it favored no difference. Together, these findings suggest that brief familiarity can shape children's expressed social preference without producing a corresponding measurable advantage on a structured word-generalization task with equivalent linguistic input.
Gratitude, one virtue that reflects a person's high moral standards, is a culturally sensitive construct expressed differently across cultural contexts. Definitions and perceptions of gratitude among children may differ from one community to another and from one region of the world to another. This study used a phenomenological design, coupled with the Indigenous standpoint theoretical framework and related participatory methodologies, to understand the virtue of gratitude among children. Conducting a qualitative survey, the authors utilized focus group discussions and key informant interviews to investigate how adolescents and adults from the pastoralist Turkana of northern Kenya and the Amhara of central Ethiopia defined and perceived gratitude in children aged 4–8 years. The authors analyzed the data thematically. The findings indicate that gratitude is defined variously as an innate capacity, an action, an expression of other virtues, and a feeling used to commune with both humans and the spirit world. Thus, gratitude reflects appreciation, thankfulness, and a positive response to acts of generosity or opportunities provided. Participants noted that gratitude manifested in children through their emotional dispositions, social interactions and relationships with others; their moral values; their actions and behaviors; and other positive character virtues. The most frequent recurring theme was defining gratitude as a relational skill used with both people and the spiritual world. These findings have implications for programs that support children developing positive virtues: they should be rooted in local cultural traditions and stress values prioritized by local communities.
Neurotypical siblings (NSs) of autistic individuals provide an important source of care to autistic siblings, yet not all NSs are willing to provide this support. Thus, there is a need to better understand the factors that influence NSs' intentions to provide care. Therefore, the present study examined adolescent NSs' intentions to provide future care for their autistic sibling. Specifically, the authors examined the associations between NS–autistic sibling relationship quality and NS caregiving intentions, NS prosocial behavior directed toward the mother and NS caregiving intentions, and the moderating effects of mothers' expectations for NS caregiving, using observational methods and self-report measures among a sample of 48 adolescent NSs and their mothers. The results of regression analyses revealed that better NS–sibling relationship quality was associated with higher NS caregiving intentions. The findings underscore the importance of the NS–sibling relationship for NS caregiving intentions.
