all child development and behavior stories

From neuroscience to childhood policy

404132862 — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:40:01 -0500

The Center on the Developing Child, founded in July 2006 to promote healthy child development as “the foundation of community development, economic prosperity, and a secure nation,” has been putting its message forth in a powerful series of colloquia across the University.

Advances in genetics can help kids learn

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:34:19 -0400

Education was becoming a no-brainer, some people at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) complained.

Kurt Fischer and his colleagues looked at the revolution in brain scanning, genetics, and other biological technologies and decided that most teachers and students weren’t getting much benefit from them. Brain scans are now available to watch what’s going on when someone is learning — or not learning. Finding genes that are involved in leaning disabilities is a hot area. Why, they asked, aren’t the powers of such technologies helping teachers in classrooms?

New science provides compelling framework for early childhood investment

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:10:00 -0400

A remarkable convergence of new knowledge about the developing brain, the human genome, and the extent to which early childhood experiences influence later learning, behavior, and health now offers policymakers an exceptional opportunity to change the life prospects of vulnerable young children, says a new report from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

The report, "A Science-Based Framework for Early Childhood Policy," integrates new research findings in neuroscience with extensive evaluations of early childhood programs, and provides a highly credible, comprehensive guide for evidence-based policymaking. It was released today (Aug. 6) in Boston at a press conference at the Annual Meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Teen diets can hurt their lungs

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:27:34 -0400

For most teenagers in the United States and Canada, fish and fruit are not high on their delicious list. Also, many of them — about 20 percent of those under 18 — cough, wheeze, and suffer from asthma and bronchitis. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have found a connection between these two situations.

A study of more than 2,100 high school seniors found that those who eat the least fruit and fish have the weakest lungs.

Children can perform approximate math without arithmetic instruction

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:10:21 -0400

Children are able to solve approximate addition or subtraction problems involving large numbers even before they have been taught arithmetic, according to a study conducted at Harvard University by researchers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard.

Weight gain in pregnancy linked to overweight in kids

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:35:18 -0400

Pregnant women who gain excessive or even appropriate weight, according to current guidelines, are four times more likely than women who gain inadequate weight to have a baby who becomes overweight in early childhood. These findings are from a new study at the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and are published in the April issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Brain pollution: Common chemicals are damaging young minds

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:43:25 -0400

Learning disabilities. Cerebral palsy. Mental retardation. A "silent pandemic" of these and other neurodevelopmental disorders is under way owing to industrial chemicals in the environment that impair brain development in fetuses and young children. That's the conclusion of a data analysis by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who point to 201 chemicals - most of them common - known to inflict lasting neurological damage in humans. Information on possible neurotoxic effects exists, however, for only a small fraction of the thousands of chemicals in use around the world.

The findings, published online in The Lancet (Nov. 8, 2006) and soon to be in print, stem from a careful review of publicly available data by lead author Philippe Grandjean, an adjunct professor in HSPH's Department of Environmental Health, and Philip Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics and chair of Community and Preventive Medicine at Mount Sinai. Their research was funded by the Danish Medical Research Council and, in the United States, by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In their report, the researchers urge countries to adopt the "precautionary" approach for chemical testing and control recently embraced by the European Union (EU). The EU has put into place strong regulations that can later be relaxed if a potential hazard proves less dangerous than anticipated, instead of requiring a high level of proof of toxicity at the outset. By contrast, U.S. requirements for the testing of chemicals for brain toxicity are minimal, the authors say.

One out of six American children has a developmental disability, usually involving the nervous system, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A growing body of evidence links industrial chemicals to neurodevelopmental disorders; treatments for such disorders are difficult and costly to families and society. Lead, for example, became the first substance identified as having toxic effects on early brain development only about 100 years ago, even though its neurotoxicity in adults had been known for centuries.

Study: Gap in energy among teens

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:06:40 -0400

A new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) shows that America's overweight teens consumed an average of 700 to 1,000 calories more than required each day over a 10-year period. This "energy gap" - or the imbalance between the number of calories children consumed each day and the number they required to support normal growth, physical activity, and body function - resulted in an average of 58 extra pounds for overweight teens.

The study, the first to look at the energy gap among children and youth, was published in the December 2006 issue of the journal Pediatrics. The study shows that U.S. children and teens overall consumed an average of 110 to 165 more calories than they required each day. Over a 10-year period, this energy gap led to an excess 10 pounds of body weight on average among teens.

"Our research indicates that early prevention may be critical," said Y. Claire Wang, the HSPH researcher who led the study. "The energy gap becomes bigger and harder to close as kids accumulate more excess weight." This suggests that strategies to prevent excess weight gain from occurring during childhood may be more effective than attempting to treat overweight teens.

"We must find ways to help kids eat well and move more," said Tracy Orleans, a distinguished fellow and senior scientist at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which sponsored the study. "That means acting now to create environments that support healthy eating and increased physical activity in schools and communities, and at home."

For the study, researchers examined height and weight data for 5,000 children in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1988 and 1994. They projected what the height and weight gains for this group would be 10 years later, based on normal growth patterns, and compared that projection to actual height and weight data from a similar group of teens in the most recent NHANES (1999 to 2002). Children were defined as overweight (sometimes called obese) if their body mass index was greater than or equal to the 95th percentile of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) growth charts.

Children are attracted to the fortunate more than the unfortunate

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:47:08 -0400

Children as young as 5 prefer lucky individuals over the less fortunate, according to new research by psychologists at Harvard and Stanford University. This phenomenon, the researchers say, could clarify the origins of human attitudes toward differing social groups and help explain the persistence of social inequality.

The work, by Kristina R. Olson and her colleagues, is published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Not unusual to forget childhood sexual abuse

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:46:50 -0400

When questioned closely by psychologists from Harvard University about their feelings, victims of childhood sexual abuse revealed some surprising impressions.

First, the abuse apparently was not seen as traumatic, terrifying, life threatening, or violent at the time. "It hurt," said one man who was raped as a boy. "And after a while I knew it was wrong, but not at the beginning." Only two out of the 27 recalled feeling traumatized at the time, report psychologists Susan Clancy and Richard McNally.

Some psychologists believe that forgetting childhood sexual abuse is a deep-seated unconscious blocking out of the event, an involuntary mechanism that automatically keeps painful memories out of consciousness. Clancy and McNally's work leads them to conclude that it's just ordinary forgetting.

"I never told anyone," said one victim. "Basically, I just forgot about it."

"Memories of childhood sexual assault can slip from awareness in the same way that ordinary memories can," Clancy asserts. Everyday forgetting can include voluntary suppression, insufficient reminders, or avoidance. "A failure to think about something is not the same as being unable to remember it," McNally adds.

A major reason for such "normal forgetting" is that the abuse, even multiple episodes, was not seen as terrifying or life threatening at the time. But how about later when the violations were recalled? All 27 of those assaulted reported multiple negative effects from the abuse, such as loss of trust in people, difficulties with relationships, sexual problems, loss of self- esteem, mental health problems, or alienation. "It may be recovered memories of the assaults as traumatic, rather than the event itself being that way, that is responsible for these adverse impacts," Clancy concludes.

Child enrichment program still pays off after 15 years

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:25:57 -0400

Researchers have detected the lasting benefits of early childhood education 15 years after the program ended. What may have seemed like three years of fun and games at the time for the low-birth weight, premature infants translated into higher achievement scores in math and reading for the intervention group at age 18.

They also tended to have fewer risky behaviors. The study, led by Marie McCormick and published in the March 2006 Pediatrics, is believed to be the largest and most rigorous of its kind.

"Early educational intervention works," said McCormick, the Sumner and Esther Feldberg professor of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School professor of pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston.

Judge Baker Children's Center welcomes a groundbreaking research project that may shed light on autism

50443248 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:35:00 -0400

Harvard-affiliated Judge Baker Children's Center is launching a research project to study autism. Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman, director and research director, respectively, of Harvard's Infant and Child Study Center, in conjunction with Martha Herbert and Katherine Martien from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), are beginning to study the brain-processing mechanisms in children with autism and young children at risk for autism with the hope of gaining a better understanding of the disability.

An existing diuretic may suppress seizures in newborns

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:41:50 -0400

A diuretic drug called bumetanide may serendipitously help treat seizures in newborns, which are difficult to control with existing anticonvulsants, according to a study in the November 2005 Nature Medicine. The study findings could lead to clinical trials of bumetanide in newborns, whose immature, rapidly- developing brains are especially vulnerable to seizures - particularly preterm newborns, in whom seizure incidence can range to over 2 percent. Newborns' seizures can cause long- term neurologic impairments and a tendency toward seizures later in life.

Conventional anticonvulsants - phenobarbital and benzodiazepines - are ineffective in newborns because their brains are biochemically different from adult brains, says neurologist Frances Jensen, MD, of Children's Hospital Boston, a senior investigator on the study. Jensen's team, led by postdoctoral fellow Delia Talos, PhD, collaborated with Kevin Staley and colleagues at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center to find a treatment for seizures that would work in newborns.

Born to add

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:21:54 -0400

In experiments, 5-year-olds, who had no real experience using number symbols, "added" two arrays of dots and compared them to a third array.

They are born to add

50443248 — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:54:41 -0400

How does someone who hasn't learned to count yet, say a preschooler, deal with numbers? Adults are comfortable with symbols like "10" to signify 10 balloons, beeps, or beliefs. But how do kids handle numbers when they don't know numbers? Very well, according to experiments done at Harvard University.
In these experiments, 5-year-olds, who had no real experience using number symbols, "added" two arrays of dots and compared them to a third array. When researchers replaced the third array of dots with beeps, the kids integrated the sight and sound quantities easily.

The children performed all these tasks successfully, without actual counting or having any knowledge of number symbols, notes Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology who led the study.