Abstract

Young children develop a range of cognitive skills that allow them to succeed in academic and social settings in the years to come. These propensities for learning (and life success more broadly) emerge as a product of opportunities provided by parents, caregivers, and characteristics of children’s environments. In this talk, I will first describe the opportunity-propensity organizing framework and contextualize it within more widely known models of child development. I will then provide evidence that to optimize skill development in early childhood, we must look at the intersection of opportunities and propensities. To do this, I will use data from play-based interactions across studies with one- to four-year-old children. Implications for intervention, parenting, and further research will be discussed.