Recent quotes:

It’s not just ‘cat ladies’: JD Vance has a history of disparaging people without kids | CNN Politics

“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said in November 2020 on a conservative podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.” “You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” he said. “And of course, you talk about going on Twitter – final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.”
#children #vance - cnn.com

Are your earliest childhood memories still lurking in your mind—or gone forever? | Science | AAAS

Research with young rats and mice suggests they, too, can access suppressed memories with a little help. In a 2016 study, Cristina Alberini, a neuroscientist at New York University, and her colleagues gave juvenile rats a foot shock when they stepped into a dark compartment within a white box. The young animals learned to stay out of the dangerous compartment, but forgot soon after. Once the animals were older, the researchers found they could jog their memory by showing them the white box and shocking them in a different colored box. Then, when the researchers returned the rats to the original white box, the combination of the two cues made the rodents remember to stay out of its dark compartment.
#psychology #memory #children - science.org

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity | PNAS

For example, adults are better at remembering the letter string PBSBBCCNN after parsing it into three smaller units: the television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN. Is this chunking a learned strategy acquired through instruction? We explored the origins of this ability by asking whether untrained infants can use conceptual knowledge to increase memory. In the absence of any grouping cues, 14-month-old infants can track only three hidden objects at once, demonstrating the standard limit of working memory. In four experiments we show that infants can surpass this limit when given perceptual, conceptual, linguistic, or spatial cues to parse larger arrays into smaller units that are more efficiently stored in memory. This work offers evidence of memory expansion based on conceptual knowledge in untrained, preverbal subjects.
#narratives #memory #children - pnas.org

Baby and adult brains 'sync up' during play: It's not your imagination -- you and your baby really are on the same wavelength -- ScienceDaily

When they looked at the data, the researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies' brains were synchronized with the adult's brain in several areas known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world -- perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them. When the adult and infant were turned away from each other and engaging with other people, the coupling between them disappeared. That fit with researchers' expectations, but the data also had surprises in store. For example, the strongest coupling occurred in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in learning, planning and executive functioning and was previously thought to be quite underdeveloped during infancy. "We were also surprised to find that the infant brain was often 'leading' the adult brain by a few seconds, suggesting that babies do not just passively receive input but may guide adults toward the next thing they're going to focus on: which toy to pick up, which words to say," said Lew-Williams, who is a co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab.
#synchronize #games #parenting #children - sciencedaily.com

Sociologists study the impact religion has on child development -- ScienceDaily

They found that third-graders' psychological adjustment and social competence were positively correlated with various religious factors. However, students' performance on reading, math, and science tests were negatively associated with several forms of parental religiosity. The findings suggest that parental religiosity is a mixed blessing that produces significant gains in social psychological development among third-graders while potentially undermining academic performance, particularly in math and science. "Religion emphasizes moral codes designed to instill values such as self-control and social competence," said Bartkowski. "Religious groups' prioritization of these soft skills may come at the expense of academic performance, which is generally diminished for youngsters raised in religious homes when compared with their non-religious peers."
#education #religion #children - sciencedaily.com

Newborn babies have inbuilt ability to pick out words -- ScienceDaily

The researchers discovered two mechanisms in three-day-old infants, which give them the skills to pick out words in a stream of sounds. The first mechanism is known as prosody, the melody of language, allow us to recognise when a word starts and stops. The second is called the statistics of language, which describes how we compute the frequency of when sounds in a word come together. The discovery provides a key insight into a first step to learning language.
#brain #language #words #learning #children - sciencedaily.com

Babies kicking in the womb are creating a map of their bodies -- ScienceDaily

The findings suggest that fetal kicks in the late stages of pregnancy -- the third trimester -- help to grow areas of the brain that deal with sensory input, and are how the baby develops a sense of their own body. The fast brainwaves evoked by the movement disappear by the time babies are a few weeks old. "Spontaneous movement and consequent feedback from the environment during the early developmental period are known to be necessary for proper brain mapping in animals such as rats. Here we showed that this may be true in humans too," explained study author Dr Lorenzo Fabrizi (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology). Kimberley Whitehead (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology) said: "We think the findings have implications for providing the optimal hospital environment for infants born early, so that they receive appropriate sensory input. For example, it is already routine for infants to be 'nested' in their cots -- this allows them to 'feel' a surface when their limbs kick, as if they were still inside the womb.
#brain #maps #children #mind-body - sciencedaily.com

A little labeling goes a long way: Infants can use a few labeled examples to spark the acquisition of object categories -- ScienceDaily

"These results suggest that semi-supervised learning can be quite powerful. Seeing just two labeled examples jump-starts infants' category learning. Once they've heard a few objects receive the same label, infants can learn the rest on their own, with or without labels," said Alexander LaTourrette, the lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. Moreover, the timing of the labeling mattered. If the two labeling episodes came at the end of the learning phase, after infants had already seen the unlabeled objects, they failed to learn the category. This tells us that infants can use semi-supervised learning. They use the power of labeling to learn more from subsequent, unlabeled objects.
#learning #children #abstraction #categories - sciencedaily.com

Faster. Slower. How We Walk Depends on Who We Walk With, and Where We Live. - The New York Times

People in Uganda, it turned out, walked much more quickly than those in Seattle when they were by themselves, their pace averaging about 11 percent swifter than lone walkers in the United States. But they were slower in groups. Both men and women in Mukono strolled at a more leisurely pace when they were with others, especially children. Their pace when accompanied by children was about 16 percent slower than when they were alone, whether they carried the children or walked beside them. The opposite was true in Seattle. There, people sped up when they walked with other people. Men were particularly hurried when walking with other men, but both men and women increased their pace if they had children in tow. Their average walking speed when they carried or accompanied children was about 20 percent speedier than when they walked alone.
#community #children #walking #socializing #family - nytimes.com

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning - Scientific American

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique human ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.
#brain #language #learning #children - scientificamerican.com

How parents cause children's friendships to end -- ScienceDaily

Results from the study found clear support for their hypothesis that negative features of parenting, such as depression and psychological control, increase the risk that best friendships would end. For children with clinically depressed parents, the risk of best friendship dissolution increased by up to 104 percent. There was a similar, although not quite as dramatic, increase in the risk of best friendship dissolution for children with psychologically controlling parents.
#depression #friends #parenting #children - sciencedaily.com

Death's Best Friend | by Jessica Weisberg | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

And so begins Kübler-Ross’s journey, one of a restless, curious woman seeking truth despite the well-meaning men who stand in her way. At six, a teacher asked her to write an essay about what she intended to be when she grew up. When she told her parents about the assignment at dinner that night, her father, a middle manager at an office-supply company, told her that she should plan for a career as his secretary. “No, thank you!” young Elisabeth snapped. That night, she wrote in her journal that she planned to become a physician and an adventurer. “I want to find out the purpose of life.”
#narratives #life #death #children - nybooks.com

Frontiers | The Role of Infection and Immune Responsiveness in a Case of Treatment-Resistant Pediatric Bipolar Disorder | Psychiatry

P’s behavior appeared treatment resistant with minimal improvement despite multiple medication trials prior to and during hospitalizations.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #ADHD #pharma #children #blame - frontiersin.org

The concept of schizophrenia is coming to an end – here's why

I expect to see the end of the concept of schizophrenia soon … the syndrome is already beginning to breakdown, for example, into those cases caused by copy number [genetic] variations, drug abuse, social adversity, etc. Presumably this process will accelerate, and the term schizophrenia will be confined to history, like “dropsy”.
#depression #psychiatry #children #schizophrenia - theconversation.com

Older mothers are better mothers, study suggests: Children of older mothers have fewer behavioral, social and emotional difficulties -- ScienceDaily

"We know that people become more mentally flexible with age, are more tolerant of other people and thrive better emotionally themselves. That's why psychological maturity may explain why older mothers do not scold and physically discipline their children as much," says Professor Dion Sommer. "This style of parenting can thereby contribute to a positive psychosocial environment which affects the children's upbringing," he concludes. The study of the correlation between maternal age and children's social and emotional development was carried out when the children were 7, 11 and 15 years old respectively. The results have been published in the scientific journal European Journal of Developmental Psychology.
#parenting #children #family - sciencedaily.com

Parents of children with serious heart defects may be at risk of PTSD -- ScienceDaily

Health professionals know that mental health issues in parents can lead to long-term cognitive, health and behavioral troubles in their children. Researchers reviewed published data from 10 countries. Among parents of children with critical congenital heart defects, researchers found: Up to 30 percent had symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of PTSD, with more than 80 percent showing significant symptoms of trauma; 25 percent to 50 percent reported elevated symptoms of depression, anxiety or both; and 30 percent to 80 percent reported experiencing severe psychological distress; In comparison, the prevalence of PTSD in the U.S. general population is 3.5 percent, with 18 percent meeting criteria for any anxiety disorder in the last year, and 9.5 percent meeting criteria for any mood disorder.
#parenting #children #family #PTSD - sciencedaily.com

Jakes Brewer meets the future

When we went to have an ultrasound for this baby, I wasn't sure if I wanted to know the gender, we did not know with Georgia, so I told the ultrasound tech, just put it in an envelope and we'll decide later, and by the time we got to the end of the ultrasound, the baby was not cooperative and in a bad position, by the time we got to the end of the long ultrasound, she had forgotten what I had told her, and she made sure I was looking away when she wrote on the screen what we're having. He was still looking, and I was looking at him, and he was like, "Whoa whoa whoa!," and he has a very good poker face. I was like, "Do you know now?," and he said, "Yep," and we being us, I didn't bug him about it, and he didn't let anything slip. That was three weeks, a month ago, and what is truly wonderful about that, is that forever more, I will know, and his son or daughter will know, that he met them that day, in that room, in a way that none of us have met this one yet, and he got to know him or her for a month, in his mind, and come up with names, and think about the future.
#children #love #family #famous-last-words - townhall.com

It turns out parenthood is worse than divorce, unemployment — even the death of a partner - The Washington Post

On average, new parenthood led to a 1.4 unit drop in happiness. That's considered very severe. To put things in perspective, previous studies have quantified the impact of other major life events on the same happiness scale in this way: divorce, the equivalent of a 0.6 "happiness unit" drop; unemployment, a one-unit drop; and the death of a partner a one-unit drop.
#happiness #children #family - washingtonpost.com

Building for the future

Years ago, Seung officiated at his best friend’s wedding, and during the invocation he told the gathering, “My father says that success is never achieved in just one generation.” As he has grown older and had a child of his own, he has felt his perspective shift. When Seung was in his 20s, science for him was solving puzzles, an extension of the math problems he did for fun as a child alone in his room on Saturdays after soccer. Now he finds great satisfaction in encouraging younger scientists, in helping them avoid dead ends that he has already explored. He wants to do something that will allow the community to progress, to build “strong foundations, steppingstones that the next generation can be sure of.”
#history #connectome #time #predictions #children - nytimes.com

What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?

University of Rochester psychologist Ed Deci, for example, found that teachers who aim to control students' behavior—rather than helping them control it themselves—undermine the very elements that are essential for motivation: autonomy, a sense of competence, and a capacity to relate to others. This, in turn, means they have a harder time learning self-control, an essential skill for long-term success. Stanford University's Carol Dweck, a developmental and social psychologist, has demonstrated that even rewards—gold stars and the like—can erode children's motivation and performance by shifting the focus to what the teacher thinks, rather than the intrinsic rewards of learning.
#managing #motivation #children - motherjones.com

Clay Johnson on the robot raising his child

The Amazon Echo is summoned by the word "Alexa" -- you say that word, and then ask it questions or tell it to do something (play some music, set a timer, check the weather, etc) and it just does it. And it works great. Especially on 2.5 year olds. I've noticed recently that Felix has started interacting with Alexa. He can't quite say the word well enough to trigger a response (he's almost there) but he'll bark orders at her; more interestingly, he treats her as an authoritati...ve source. A few days ago, Felix told me that it wasn't time to go back home from the playground because Alexa said it wasn't time to go. Then, On Saturday, on the way to a birthday party, after I disobeyed the GPS's command to take a highway, Felix chimed in from the back seat: "Dad, *other* Alexa said you need to take the highway" Our minds were blown at this for a lot of reasons. And it's all fascinating, and I'm sure somebody will write books about the kids who grew up with computers they could talk to just like they wrote books about my generation interacting with televisions and the Internet. But that's *not* the point of this little Facebook post. No, the point is, Amazon shipped functionality that allows you to make the Echo say things via a handy remote control. So realizing that Felix viewed his invisible friend "Alexa" as an authority, and realizing that I could make Alexa say things, we seized the moment tonight. C: Felix, it's time for bed. F: NEVER. THERE WILL BE NO BED. NOT NOW NOT EVER. NO NOTHING. NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. (exact words.) C: Okay. Well, I'm going to go get a bath ready. Alexa: Felix, it's time to go take a bath. F: Really Alexa? Alexa: Yes. Please join your father in the bathroom. Felix was in the bathroom immediately, and told me that it was time for his bath. After bath, he promptly told Alexa good night. She told him to have sweet dreams. Parents who are prime members, the Amazon Echo costs $99, and it is worth every penny. Tomorrow we'll try housework.
#education #children #robots - facebook.com

Growing Up on Easy Street Has Its Own Dangers

Using a variety of data that included families with median household incomes of about $150,000, she found that the adolescents in higher-income families had higher rates of substance abuse of all kinds than those in lower-income ones. This makes a certain amount of sense, since they can afford the drugs, the vehicles to go buy them and the fake IDs that help with the procurement of Stoli and Jägermeister.But there was more. The more affluent suburban youth stole from their parents more often than city youth with less money and were more likely to experience clinically significant levels of depression, anxiety and physical ailments that seemed to stem from those mental conditions. These things began emerging as early as seventh grade.
#psychology #children #poverty #money #irony #suburbia - nytimes.com