Early Social Interaction

A reference guide to autism spectrum disorders that provides an in-depth overview of the communication, language, social, and behavioral issues of autism spectrum disorders.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

When a young child begins to engage in everyday interaction, she has to acquire competencies that allow her to be oriented to the conventions that inform talk-in-interaction and, at the same time, deal with emotional or affective dimensions of experience. The theoretical positions associated with these domains - social-action and emotion - provide very different accounts of human development and this book examines why this is the case. Through a longitudinal video-recorded study of one child learning how to talk, Michael A. Forrester develops proposals that rest upon a comparison of two perspectives on everyday parent-child interaction taken from the same data corpus - one informed by conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, the other by psychoanalytic developmental psychology. Ultimately, what is significant for attaining membership within any culture is gradually being able to display an orientation towards both domains - doing and feeling, or social-action and affect.

This book considers how a young child becomes a member of culture through the practices and procedures of everyday conversation.

This book presents the Preschool Peer Social Intervention (PPSI), a manualized comprehensive social curriculum to enhance peer-interaction for pre-schoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in three key domains: play, interaction, and conversation. The book outlines the PPSI’s transactional approach in each of the three intervention domains and incorporates developmental features and age-appropriate play, interaction, and conversation skills while accounting for individual differences in social communication abilities. The intervention is designed to be implemented within the child’s natural social environment, such as preschool, and it includes the child’s social agents, namely, their peers, teachers, and parents. PPSI intervention curricula addressed in this book are based on typical play, interaction, and conversation development, taking into account the social and communication challenges found to characterize young children with ASD in these domains. Building up the ability to play, interact and converse more efficiently with peers may render a substantial impact on preschoolers with ASD, with vast potential for improving not only these children’s immediate social experience with peers, but also their future social competence that relies on these early building blocks.

This book unites research and theoretical work that addresses the relations between social interaction and the development of children's understanding. Contributors present and discuss research on the roles adults and/or peers play in children's development. They report results of research on social interaction and the development of preschool-aged and elementary school children's understanding in areas such as: use of metacognitive strategies, understanding of social events, moral and affective development, use of planning skills, knowledge of social conventions, and development of play interests. Across all contexts, the role of others is discussed as providing support, direction, or challenge for children's developing understanding. Changes in children's understanding, in turn, simultaneously inform interactional adjustments by both children and others. It is the recognition and consideration of this complementary relationsip between developing understanding and organization of social interactions that provies the volume's unifying theme.

This volume explores the development as early as infancy of social cognitive abilities, including prelinguistic communicative and monitoring abilities hitherto only suspected. For developmental psychologists and early childhood educators.

Research shows that a child's social and behavioral skills affect the development of cognitive and physical abilities. Set students on a path to success and have fun doing it with this newly retitled edition of the popular Wanna Play. The authors provide hundreds of activities that help children learn how to behave appropriately and make friends. Included are tools for teaching emotion regulation, team playing, and body safety to all children, making this resource ideal for use in inclusive settings. New features include: A social interaction checklist for identifying learners' strengths and weaknesses Teacher-friendly activities that can be used in small groups or with the whole class A chapter on teaching emotions and communication skills Students with social challenges benefit from direct instruction, and early intervention helps prevent behavior problems and pave the way to academic success. This hands-on guidebook gives teachers, counselors, behavior therapists, and caregivers a wealth of easily implemented and fun-filled ways to enhance children's skills in all areas of social interaction.

This collection of cues will enable parents and professionals to help children with social development difficulties navigate their social world and enjoy interacting with their peers. Each section begins with a simple rule; the reason why the child may be having difficulty in this area is explained; and easy prompts and practice ideas are provided.

From leading clinical researchers, this volume presents important recent advances in understanding and treating autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in very young children. The book is grounded in cutting-edge findings on the social-communication behavior of typically and atypically developing infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. The contributors highlight the connections between ASD and specific early social-communication impairments - including problems with joint attention, imitation, and play - with a focus on what clinicians can do to help. Innovative screening and assessment procedures are reviewed, as are evidence-based intervention and prevention strategies. Throughout, attention to both real-world practice and research considerations enhances the book's utility as a clinical reference and text.