Middle Childhood - When The Adult Brain Starts To Boot Up

via NYT: The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood

In middle childhood, the brain is open for suggestions. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Well, you could take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski.

Minimalist Shoes For Kids

Run free kids.

The value of going shoe-free has been linked before.

NaturalRunningCenter.com has more on the topic in Get Your Kids Into Minimalist Shoes to Ensure Natural Foot Development because, as stated in the post "Kids’ shoes until recently have been marketed by the shoe companies to parents, educators, and health care professionals to prepare our kids for shoes they are marketing for adults to wear."

For a review on some minimalist shoes available from Golden Shoes in downtown TC see BRU: Merrell Barefoot Kids Review (Pace and Trail Glove)

More On The Importance Of Zero To Six

Via PsychToday: Getting Ahead: Why Preschool Benefits the Brain

Although preschool does not teach market economics or neuroscience, it provides necessary skills that are essential to getting—and keeping—a job later in life. Most important, children learn how to socialize with peers, manage stress and solve problems. At age 28, the adults who received preschool educations years before had significantly higher job prestige, earnings and socioeconomic status.

In addition to boosting the life-course prospects of the children who received preschool education, the program also saves society money. It costs around $8,000 to send a child to preschool for a half day during the school year, but the estimated benefits in terms of increased productivity and reduced cost to the criminal justice system put the savings at just over $80,000, a ten-fold return on investment.

More On The Importance Of Kindergarten Study

Covered previously in Where To Focus Your Resources

The research was recently in Harvard Magazine: Kindergarten Matters

[Via 3QD]

Confirmation Of The Praise Paradox

If you are not familiar with the downside of too much praise for your child then stop what you're doing because I'm going to ruin what you used to know.

First read at NYMag: How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The inverse power of praise.

Via TheAtlantic comes confirmation from an extensive study: Be Wary of Calling Kids 'Gifted'

Play Is Not The Same As Violence

There have been studies showing that physical play with kids stimulates the release of beneficial brain chemicals.

Last week I was fortunate to have a lot of play time with a 4 year old boy which was much different than play time with a 4 year old girl. But they both seemed to benefit and enjoy what we called "wrestle time", or as they liked to say "wrastle".

The boy and girl were clearly different in how they spent this wrestle time. The boy appeared to want to test the limits and the girl in pinning me and getting pinned back.

What is clear to me that the time I give my girls for roughhousing would be inadequate for a boy - if I had a boy I'd want to dedicate periods of time where he could have physical play (with rules to keep it from being violent) and get out his aggression with the understanding that outside of "wrestle time" physical play was not appropriate.

And so it seems like fortuitous timing when returning to civilization I came across this in the news. Via MSNBC: Bring it: Boys may benefit from aggressive play

Barefoot Kids

I remember when I was a kid I preferred going barefoot because I felt like I was faster without shoes.

Now on the heels of the barefoot running movement comes a story from the GuardianUK: Why barefoot is best for children

[Via Rebecca]

Music For Nerds

"How to make your kid smarter: Music lessons"

Morning Sickness Is Not All Bad

Via ScientificAmerican: A new study shows a correlation between nausea and vomiting during pregnancy and the long-term neurocognitive development of those kids.

According to one hypothesis, vomiting reduces caloric intake, decreasing insulin secretion. Low insulin, in turn, boosts levels of other hormones that are known to play a role in the de­velopment of a healthy placenta and a healthy blood supply to growing brains.

Recent Studies About Television Viewing

Background TV found to have negative effect on parent-child interactions

When the TV was on, the researchers found, both the quantity and the quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. Specifically, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their children and the quality of the interactions declined, with parents less active, attentive, and responsive to their youngsters.

Children under 3 can't learn action words from TV - unless an adult helps

Without adult support, children under age 3 could not learn the words directly from the program, nor could they understand them when they appeared in a different context within the video.

Smart Is As Smart Does

Via PhysOrg: Educate yourself to boost achievement in kids

"If you want your kids to do well in school, then the amount of education you get yourself is important," said Pamela Davis-Kean, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). "This may mean that parents need to go back to school.

"A growing number of large-scale, long-term studies now show that increasing parental education beyond high school is strongly linked to increasing language ability in children. Even after controlling for parental income, marital status and a host of other factors, we find that the impact of parental education remains significant."

A Reason For Fathers

In their parenting roles, fathers (very generally speaking) are engaged in more physical play with their kids than mothers. It seems there may be a biochemical reason for this. This early physical contact may stimulate the brain of young children to be more receptive to the neurotransmitter chemicals that make people social creatures.

At least that is my intuitive leap based on this story at NewSci: Fathers aren't dispensable just yet

Warped Puberty

Is bisphenol A to blame for the early onset of puberty in young women?

See: The Pre-teen Girl Mystery

Redshirting First Grade

Yesterday morning NPR had a story about teenage football kickers. The boy they interviewed was 15. But he was in the 8th grade!

I was 17 when I graduated from high school. I was always one of the youngest kids in my class. I never found it to be an academic deterrent. It was an athletic challenge - a challenge until I was 16 and in my junior year that is. At that time my body caught up to the lessons and skills I had developed from always competing against more physically mature opponents. In the end I saw it as an advantage.

But it seems there is a trend of more parents delaying their child's entry into school in order to provide an advantage that an extra year of development provides.

See Federal Reserve Bank Of Boston Working Paper: The Lengthening of Childhood

there is little evidence that being older than your classmates has any long-term, positive effect on adult outcomes such as IQ, earnings, or educational attainment. By contrast, there is substantial evidence that entering school later reduces educational attainment (by increasing high school dropout rates) and depresses lifetime earnings (by delaying entry into the labor market)

I also read a recent book review of 'The Nurture Assumption' (See sp!ked: It’s time to move beyond the nature/nurture divide). This book makes the argument that parents have very little to do with how their child turns out. And in fact, genes and peer groups are the most important determiners.

‘The experts are wrong: parental nurturing is not what determines how a child turns out'

This relates to this idea of redshirting because many parents believe that they can improves their child's self-esteem if they give them an advantage to succeed. However, as the book argues:

Contrary to the current orthodoxy, Harris argues that self-esteem is based on what we do, not on how we are encouraged to feel.

Looking at this from my own standpoint as someone who was young but had a best friend in elementary school who was redshirted (held back in first grade actually), there is no doubt that he had higher self-esteem for a long time and I wondered what was wrong with me. However, over the long term the advantage I gained of besting older kids prepared me better for the real world than the short-term artificial advantage provided to the kids who were held back.

But in the end, the parent is right. If a parent feels that their child is not ready for school then they must trust that instinct. However, they must also keep in mind if their decision is based on what they want or what their child needs.

You Can Relax About The Pacifier

See NYT: Children: No Harm to Breast-Feeding From Pacifiers

Writing in The Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, researchers say they found no good evidence of a link between pacifier use and nursing.

“Pacifiers have traditionally been thought to interfere with optimal breast-feeding,” wrote the researchers, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. In the 1980s, health officials discouraged their use.

But in recent years, researchers have found evidence that babies who use pacifiers when they sleep may be less susceptible to sudden infant death syndrome. The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends that pacifiers be used for that reason.

Speech + Movement Can Improve Kids' Learning

See: Gestures and learning: Using gestures -- not just seeing them -- can help kids learn

Intelligence Is A Muscle

And it is important to get kids started early (like in a Montessori program)

At the NYT: How to Raise Our I.Q.

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity...
Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them).

Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes.

This story reminded me of what I consider must-reading for all parents at NYMag: How Not to Talk to Your Kids

Confirming What You Already Knew

PhysOrg: Physical activity may strengthen children's ability to pay attention

Toddlers Are Neither Here Nor There

Via LiveScience: Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told

The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it...

"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom."

Little Things Moms-to-Be Can Do

Visit farms regularly, get plenty of sunlight (or Vitamin D), and have a stimulating environment (seems Lamarckian).

See:
SciDaily: Farm Moms May Help Children Beat Allergies

PhysOrg: Sun In Pregnancy Builds Stronger Bones For Baby

TechReview: A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution? Two new studies show that the effects of a mother's early environment can be passed on to the next generation.