Closeness, Conflict, and Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy: Finnish Pre- and In-service Early Education Teachers' Perceptions.

This study explored the factorial and concurrent validity of a scale developed for assessing teachers' self-efficacy beliefs in engaging with diversity in early childhood education settings. According to tests of measurement invariance, the conceptualization of the constructs varied to some extent between Finnish student teachers and qualified teachers. Qualified teachers reported, at the item level, higher confidence in engaging with diversity in mainstream early childhood classrooms than student teachers.

Quality of both parents' cognitive guidance and quantity of early childhood education: Influences on pre-mathematical development.

Background: Only a handful of longitudinal studies have explored the effects of both parents in early parenthood on children's cognitive development, and no study has controlled for simultaneous early childhood education and care (ECEC) experiences.

Aims: To examine the similarity of each parent's cognitive guidance and contribution to children's pre-mathematical outcomes across parent gender while controlling for amount of ECEC.

Sample: A longitudinal study on 66 Finnish two-parent families and their children.

Fathers' and mothers' attachment representations as predictors of preadolescents' attachment security: A ten-year follow-up of Finnish families.

The question of how mothers' and fathers' representations of attachment correlate ten years later with children's perceptions of attachment relationships was examined in a longitudinal study on Finnish families (N = 42). The parents completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) during the child's first year of life. At 11 years, the children filled out three scales on how secure they perceive the relationship with each parent.

Finnish mother's and father's attachment representations during child's first year predict psychosocial adjustment in preadolescence.

The aim of the longitudinal study was to examine, for the first time in a Nordic country, whether autonomous parenting in infancy affects psychosocial adjustment in preadolescence. Attachment representations of mothers and fathers were investigated with the Adult Attachment Interview in a community sample of two-parent Finnish families. Most mothers and fathers were classified as autonomous, a finding which is in line with normative Western distributions.

Families, Not Parents, Differ: Development of Communication in Finnish Infants.

This longitudinal study on Finnish families was conducted to identify developmental differences in family-level communication among mothers, fathers, and their infants during the second half of the infant's first year, and associations with infants' later language and communicative skills. We examined coregulated communication of parent-infant dyads during 5-min laboratory play sessions at 7 and 11 months. Few differences in mutually regulated communicative exchanges emerged between maternal and paternal dyads, and few developmental changes were found across the whole sample.

Early words, multiword utterances and maternal reading strategies as predictors of mastering word inflections in Finnish.

This is the first study to report how children's language skills and mothers' book-reading strategies, measured at 2;0, predict mastery of word inflections at 3;0 and 5;0 in a sample of 66 Finnish children. Three theoretical models were tested on the longitudinal data using path analyses. The testing of the models suggests direct developmental continuity from producing words and multiword utterances on later inflectional growth, but indirect effects of maternal strategies on language outcomes.