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Strollerderby
What memories do kids take from the first years of life?
Recently, my three-year-old son and I were back at his daycare for a school play date. He hadn’t seen the school since shortly after his second birthday. We peered into the play yard and he immediately said, “Hey, they have a new slide!” He remembered the yard and its exact contents even though he hadn’t been there in almost a year.
If you have a preschooler, or even a little toddler, you know how impressive their little memories are. They hang on to details for longer and longer periods starting in the first year of life. I’ve written about kids’ memory development before and when I interviewed one prominent memory researcher, Carolyn Rovee-Collier, she told me about her experiments to test little baby memory; 2-month-olds can easily remember isolated events for a few days, whereas 6-month-olds can remember an event for about two weeks. If you “remind them,” however, the memories persist for months (that’s why if grandma visits frequently enough even your tiny newborn will remember her).
It just grows from there, until by the early preschool years our kids remember events that happened a year ago or more.
So then why do memories from the first three years of life eventually get wiped out? And how can those years be so important if they fade into nothing in our memories? Continue reading »
Science-backed ideas for baby smarts
We know that blasting Mozart into your belly or plopping your little one in front of an Einstein DVD isn’t going to make Ivy League attendance more likely.
But we do know a lot about how infants learn, the kind of information they seek, and especially how their minds grow and change through our relationship with them. Of course, the objective isn’t really Harvard — when I say “smarts,” what I mean is that we want our kids to develop emotional skill, follow their interests, and learn how to focus and work hard towards something they care about.
If it sounds like a tall order for such a small person (indeed, this post is about infants, who may still be working on how to sit up or string together vowel-consonent babble) I promise it’s not. These principles aren’t of the fussy, hyper-parenting, flashcard variety. They are basic ideas about baby brain development — some of which, at the core, actually involve us taking a step back.
Here they are, from my Science of Kids column today, 7 tips for baby brain power: Continue reading »
Teens pressure each other to take risks without even meaning to.
A new study mentioned in the NYT Well Blog shows that teenagers’ brains are affected by peer pressure. Even very subtle peer pressure.
Believing a friend is watching them play a video game from the next room motivates young teenagers to take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take. In the study, kids who thought their friends were watching them crashed their video game cars 60% more than those who thought they were playing alone.
The peer pressure there is pretty subtle: the kids weren’t directly encouraged by peers to take the risks, they just did it when they thought their friends were passively watching.
The effect did not appear in adults or college students in the same experiment. It seems like peer pressure is a powerful force on young teens. We all knew that. But this study shows us a little more of why. See, the study participants were hooked up to an MRI while playing these games.
Marriage and the brain
Are you still madly in love with your spouse?
If you feel tingly, butterflies-in-your-stomach, head-over-heels for your spouse even after years of being together, your brain may look different than those of couples who feel more of the comfortable-companion and life-partner kind of love — the “cozy pair of slippers” love that sometimes develops when people have known each other for years.
Researchers reported last month in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience on fMRI scan findings that show some couples’ brains resemble the brains of newly in-love partners. Here’s why: Continue reading »
Smart(er) boy!
Yet another study has concluded that breast is, in fact, best. But what’s even more interesting about this one is that breast-fed boys did even better than their non-breast-fed counterparts in school.
Girls? Not much of a difference.
The study, published in Pediatrics, found that infants who were nursed at least for six months performed better in school at age 10 than kids who were formula-fed. Academics at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth, Australia, looked at the academic performance of kids whose mothers had enrolled in the study years ago. They say they adjusted for gender, income, maternal education, and things like whether the kid was read to at home. Continue reading »
Working on that spatial cognition?
Oh the video games. Kids love ‘em! Parents, not so much. How could we? There are all those studies about the violent video games making a child prone to bullying and aggressive behavior.
Other studies about video games attention problems (then again, they may just appeal more to children with attention issues).
In fact, violent video games can be so bad that this Fall, the Supreme Court heard an argument on whether or not they should be banned in California.
Steve Johnson claims they help with attention in an ADHD world, but ADHD is a brain disorder, not the same as living in a fast paced world. So is there anything really good that can come out of playing video games? Turns out there is! Continue reading »
Play time!
Babies as young as six month are part of an effort to identify and treat autism by adapting a daily therapy for toddlers to younger children.
According to The New York Times, researchers across the country are taking an approach that’s been shown to help toddlers — it’s called the Early Start Denver Model — and adapting it for babies who at six months don’t make eye contact, smile, babble, and show greater interest in objects, all risk factors for autism. Continue reading »
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