Category: Child Development

Positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being, according to Associate Professor Craig Olsson from Deakin University and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues. In contrast, academic achievement appears to have little effect on adult well-being. The exploratory work, looking at the child and adolescent origins of well-being in adulthood, is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies.

We know very little about how aspects of childhood and adolescent development, such as academic and social-emotional function, affect adult well-being — defined here as a combination of a sense of coherence, positive coping strategies, social engagement and self-perceived strengths.

Olsson and team analysed data for 804 people followed up for 32 years, who participated in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (DMHDS) in New Zealand. They explored the relative importance of early academic and social pathways to adult well-being.

In particular, they measured the relationship between level of family disadvantage in childhood, social connectedness in childhood, language development in childhood, social connectedness in adolescence, academic achievement in adolescence and well-being in adulthood. Social connectedness in childhood is defined by the parent and teacher ratings of the child being liked, not being alone, and the child's level of confidence. Social connectedness in adolescence is demonstrated by social attachments (parents, peers, school, confidant) and participation in youth groups and sporting clubs.

The researchers found, on the one hand, a strong pathway from child and adolescent social connectedness to adult well-being. This illustrates the enduring significance of positive social relationships over the lifespan to adulthood. On the other hand, the pathway from early language development, through adolescent academic achievement, to adult well-being was weak, which is in line with existing research showing a lack of association between socioeconomic prosperity and happiness.

The analyses also suggest that the social and academic pathways are not intimately related to one another, and may be parallel paths.

The authors conclude: "If these pathways are separate, then positive social development across childhood and adolescence requires investments beyond development of the academic curriculum."

A study of primary school pupils who spoke English or Italian- half of whom also spoke Gaelic or Sardinian- found that the bilingual children were significantly more successful in the tasks set for them. The Gaelic-speaking children were, in turn, more successful than the Sardinian speakers.

The differences were linked to the mental alertness required to switch between languages, which could develop skills useful in other types of thinking. The further advantage for Gaelic-speaking children may have been due to the formal teaching of the language and its extensive literature.

In contrast, Sardinian is not widely taught in schools on the Italian island and has a largely oral tradition, which means there is currently no standardised form of the language.

Dr Fraser Lauchlan, an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde’s School of Psychological Sciences & Health, led the research. It was conducted with colleagues at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, where he is a Visiting Professor.

Dr Lauchlan said: “Bilingualism is now largely seen as being beneficial to children but there remains a view that it can be confusing, and so potentially detrimental to them.

“Our study has found that it can have demonstrable benefits, not only in language but in arithmetic, problem solving and enabling children to think creatively. We also assessed the children’s vocabulary, not so much for their knowledge of words as their understanding of them. Again, there was a marked difference in the level of detail and richness in description from the bilingual pupils.   

“We also found they had an aptitude for selective attention- the ability to identify and focus on information which is important, while filtering out what is not- which could come from the ‘code-switching’ of thinking in two different languages.”

In the study, a total of 121 children in Scotland and Sardinia- 62 of them bilingual- were set tasks in which they were asked to reproduce patterns of coloured blocks, to repeat orally a series of numbers, to give clear definitions of words and to resolve mentally a set of arithmetic problems. The tasks were all set in English or Italian and the children taking part were aged around nine. 

During the research, Dr Lauchlan’s post at the University of Cagliari was funded by the Sardinian Regional Government (Regione Autonoma della Sardegna).

The study, led by Michigan State University's Kathy Stansbury, found that 23 percent of youngsters received some type of "negative touch" when they failed to comply with a parental request in public places such as restaurants and parks. Negative touch included arm pulling, pinching, slapping and spanking.

"I was very surprised to see what many people consider a socially undesirable behavior done by nearly a quarter of the caregivers," Stansbury said. "I have also seen hundreds of kids and their parents in a lab setting and never once witnessed any of this behavior."

Stansbury is a trained psychologist and associate professor in MSU's Department of Human Development and Family Studies. With the study, she wanted to get a realistic gauge of how often parents use what she calls positive and negative touch in noncompliance episodes with their children, in a real-world natural setting, outside the laboratory.

A group of university student researchers anonymously observed 106 discipline interactions between caregivers and children ages 3-5 in public places and recorded the results. The data were vetted, analyzed and published in the current issue of the research journal Behavior and Social Issues.

Stansbury said another surprising finding was that male caregivers touched the children more during discipline settings than female caregivers — and the majority of the time it was in a positive manner. Positive touch included hugging, tickling and patting.

She said this positive approach contradicts the age-old stereotype of the father as the parent who lays down the law.

"When we think of Dad, we think of him being the disciplinarian, and Mom as nurturer, but that's just not what we saw," Stansbury said. "I do think that we are shifting as a society and fathers are becoming more involved in the daily mechanics of raising kids, and that's a good thing for the kids and also a good thing for the dads."

Ultimately, positive touch caused the children to comply more often, more quickly and with less fussing than negative touch, or physical punishment, Stansbury said. When negative touch was used, even when children complied, they often pouted or sulked afterward, she said.

"If your child is upset and not minding you and you want to discipline them, I would use a positive, gentle touch," Stansbury said. "Our data found that negative touch didn't work."

Stansbury's co-authors were David W. Haley of the University of Toronto-Scarborough and MSU researchers Holly Brophy-Herb and Jung Ah Lee.

The study focused on "social essentialism," or the belief that certain social categories, such as race or gender, mark fundamentally distinct kinds of people. For instance, social essentialism facilitates the belief that because one girl is bad at math, girls in general will be bad at math. While previous scholarship has shown that essentialist beliefs about social categories, such as gender or race, appear as early as preschool, it has been less clear on the processes that lead to the formation of these beliefs.

This dynamic was the focus of the PNAS study.

Specifically, the researchers tested whether generic language plays a powerful role in shaping the development of social essentialism by guiding children to develop essentialist beliefs about social categories that they would not otherwise view in this manner. In addition, in order to understand how social essentialism is transmitted, they examined whether or not holding essentialist beliefs about a social category leads parents to produce more generic language describing the category when talking to their children.

In the study, the researchers introduced four-year-old children and their parents to a fictional category of people — "Zarpies" — via an illustrated storybook. Each page presented a picture of a single person displaying a unique physical or behavioral property. The characters were diverse with respect to sex, race, and age in order to eliminate the possibility of existing essentialist beliefs influencing the results. For instance, if all of the "Zarpies" were Asian, subjects might apply essentialist beliefs to the group if they generally have essentialist beliefs about race. In the experiment, the adults read the book twice while an experimenter read the book to the children two times.

In two experiments, in which a single line of text described the accompanying pictures, hearing generic language about a novel social category led both preschool-age children and adults to develop essentialist beliefs about the category. For example, subjects in a generic-language condition ("Look at this Zarpie! Zarpies are scared of ladybugs") were significantly more likely than those in a specific-language condition ("Look at this Zarpie! This Zarpie is scared of ladybugs!") to express essentialist beliefs — even a few days after the experiment.

A third experiment sought to understand how social essentialism is transmitted — specifically, can parents communicate such beliefs to their children through conversation? To study this, parents were introduced to the category "Zarpies" via a paragraph that led them to hold essentialist beliefs about Zarpies (i.e., by describing Zarpies as a distinct kind of people with many biological and cultural differences from other social groups) or non-essentialist beliefs about Zarpies (i.e., by describing Zarpies as a non-distinct kind of people, with many biological and cultural similarities to other populations).

After reading the introductory paragraph, parents received a picture book containing the illustrations used in studies one and two, with no accompanying text. They were asked to talk through the picture book with their child and describe the people and events depicted, just as they would a picture book at home. No other instructions were provided. The entire parent-child conversation was videotaped and transcribed.

There was no difference in number of utterances or references to the characters between the two conditions. However, a higher percentage of the character references were generic in the essentialist condition compared with the non-essentialist condition. In addition, parents produced more negative evaluations in the essentialist condition than in the non-essentialist condition.

"Taken together, these results showed that generic language is a mechanism by which social essentialist beliefs, as well as tendencies towards stereotyping and prejudice, can be transmitted from parents to children," said the study's lead author, Marjorie Rhodes, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Psychology.

She added that these results do not show that generic language creates essentialist thought, but, rather, that children's cognitive biases lead them to assume that some social categories reflect essential differences — and that generic language signals to them to which categories they should apply these beliefs.

"Understanding the mechanisms that underlie the development of social essentialism could provide guidance on how to disrupt these processes, and thus perhaps on how to reduce stereotyping and prejudice," added co-author Sarah-Jane Leslie, an assistant professor in Princeton's Department of Philosophy. "We often change the way we speak about a given social group, so grounding these changes in mechanisms shown to influence the formation of essentialist beliefs could lead to more effective efforts to reduce societal prejudice."

And the good news for parents and educators, the researchers said, is that attention and persistence skills are malleable and can be taught.

The results were just published online in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

"There is a big push now to teach children early academic skills at the preschool level," said Megan McClelland, an OSU early child development researcher and lead author of the study. "Our study shows that the biggest predictor of college completion wasn't math or reading skills, but whether or not they were able to pay attention and finish tasks at age 4."

Parents of preschool children were asked to rate their children on items such as "plays with a single toy for long periods of time" or "child gives up easily when difficulties are encountered." Reading and math skills were assessed at age 7 using standardized assessments. At age 21, the same group was tested again for reading and math skills.

Surprisingly, achievement in reading and math did not significantly predict whether or not the students completed college. Instead, researchers found that children who were rated higher by their parents on attention span and persistence at age 4 had nearly 50 percent greater odds of getting a bachelor's degree by age 25.

McClelland, who is a nationally-recognized expert in child development, said college completion has been shown in numerous studies to lead to higher wages and better job stability. She said the earlier that educators and parents can intervene, the more likely a child can succeed academically.

"We didn't look at how well they did in college or at grade point average," McClelland said. "The important factor was being able to focus and persist. Someone can be brilliant, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can focus when they need to and finish a task or job."

McClelland, who is also a core director in OSU's Hallie E. Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families, said interventions aimed at increasing young children's self-control abilities have repeatedly shown to help boost "self-regulation," or a child's ability to listen, pay attention, follow through on a task and remember instructions.

In a past study, McClelland found that simple, active classroom games such as Simon Says and Red Light/Green Light have been effective tools for increasing both literacy and self-regulation skills.

"Academic ability carries you a long way, but these other skills are also important," McClelland said. "Increasingly, we see that the ability to listen, pay attention, and complete important tasks is crucial for success later in life."

OSU's Alan Acock, along with Andrea Piccinin of the University of Victoria and Sally Ann Rhea and Michael Stallings of the University of Colorado, contributed to this study, which was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a Colorado Adoption Project grant.

"Because many overweight Chinese children underestimate their weight, they are less likely to do anything to improve their diet or exercise patterns," said Nengliang Yao, graduate student in health policy and administration. "If they don't make changes, they are likely to be obese and have a lot of health problems in the future — as we often see in the United States already."

Children between the ages of 6 and 18, living in nine different provinces in China, had their height and weight measured and body mass index (BMI) calculated as part of the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). The children and their mothers were separately asked to indicate whether they thought the child was underweight, normal weight or overweight.

The researchers looked at data from the CHNS for 176 overweight Chinese children and found that 69 percent of these children underestimated their own weight. Mothers were even more likely to underestimate the weight of their children, with 72 percent of the mothers rating their overweight children as normal or underweight, Yao reported in a recent issue of the World Journal of Pediatrics.

If a mother's BMI was lower, she was less likely to recognize her own child as overweight than a mother with a higher BMI. The researchers suggest that overweight mothers may have a better understanding of what "overweight" means from personal experience.

"Our study is more representative than previous studies because they have samples from only one province or maybe two cities," said Yao. "We have a better representation with nine provinces."

This research also is unusual because it includes measured height and weight, while much past research used self-reported height and weight. The researchers also used a larger population sample to gain a better understanding of how children's age, maternal education and place of residence affect weight and perceived weight.

They note that parental education and involvement is important in changing children's dietary and physical behaviors in the U.S., and recommend a similar approach for Chinese children. Public education campaigns can also help to raise awareness of the problem in China.

"I think the main message is that parents and kids often don't have an accurate perception of weight," said Marianne M. Hillemeier, associate professor of health policy and administration and demography. "In the U.S. some health care providers don't measure height and weight and compute BMI at regular well-child visits, so parents and children aren't always getting information from the doctors. Awareness is important no matter where you live."

The study — led by University of Adelaide Public Health researcher Dr Lisa Smithers — looked at the link between the eating habits of children at six months, 15 months and two years, and their IQ at eight years of age.

The study of more than 7,000 children compared a range of dietary patterns, including traditional and contemporary home-prepared food, ready-prepared baby foods, breastfeeding, and 'discretionary' or junk foods.

"Diet supplies the nutrients needed for the development of brain tissues in the first two years of life, and the aim of this study was to look at what impact diet would have on children's IQs," Dr Smithers says.

"We found that children who were breastfed at six months and had a healthy diet regularly including foods such as legumes, cheese, fruit and vegetables at 15 and 24 months, had an IQ up to two points higher by age eight.

"Those children who had a diet regularly involving biscuits, chocolate, sweets, soft drinks and chips in the first two years of life had IQs up to two points lower by age eight.

"We also found some negative impact on IQ from ready-prepared baby foods given at six months, but some positive associations when given at 24 months," Dr Smithers says.

Dr Smithers says this study reinforces the need to provide children with healthy foods at a crucial, formative time in their lives.

"While the differences in IQ are not huge, this study provides some of the strongest evidence to date that dietary patterns from six to 24 months have a small but significant effect on IQ at eight years of age," Dr Smithers says.

"It is important that we consider the longer-term impact of the foods we feed our children," she says.

The results of this study have been published online in the European Journal of Epidemiology.

"We can choose any number of traits to study but we try and choose traits that are not only interesting for their own sake but also have some biomedical relevance," said Phelps. "We take advantage of the unique property of the species."

The song of the singing mouse song is a rapid-fire string of high-pitched chirps called trills used mostly used by males in dominance displays and to attract mates. Up to 20 chirps are squeaked out per second, sounding similar to birdsong to untrained ears. But unlike birds, the mice generally stick to a song made up of only a single note.

"They sound kind of soft to human ears, but if you slow them down by about three-fold they are pretty dramatic," said Phelps.

Most rodents make vocalizations at a frequency much too high for humans to hear. But other rodents typically don't vocalize to the extent of singing mice, which use the song to communicate over large distances in the wild, said Andreas George, a graduate student working in Phelps' lab.

Within the last year Phelps research on the behavior of the mouse has appeared in the journals Hormones and Behavior and Animal Behavior. But one of his newest research projects is looking deeper: examining the genetic components that influence song expression. Center stage is a special gene called FOXP2.

"FOXP2 is famous because it's the only gene that's been implicated in human speech disorders specifically," said Phelps.

Having at least one mutated copy of the gene has been associated with a host of language problems in humans, from difficulty understanding grammar to an inability to make the precise mouth movements needed to speak a clear sentence.

The FOXP2 gene is remarkably similar overall between singing mice, lab mice and humans, said Phelps. To find parts of the gene that may contribute to the singing mouse's songs, Phelps is searching for sequences unique to the singing mouse and testing them for evidence of natural selection, which weeds out mutations with no likely observable effect from those that are likely to contribute to singing behavior.

"Those two things go a long way," said Phelps, " And when you look at the intersection of those two things they give us a really good set of candidate regions for what might be causing species differences."

The Molecular Connection

Most genetic mutations don't cause serious problems. They are often a part of the genome that is not expressed, still make a functional product, or are simply drowned out by the amount of genes and gene products that are working correctly.

FOXP2 mutations, on the other hand, can have significant effects on speech because of the gene's role as a transcription factor — a gene product that helps control the expression of other genes.

This means a mutation in the FOXP2 gene can start a chain of events that can lead to reduced expression, or possibly even no expression, of a number of other genes.

Phelps and his team are figuring out what activates FOXP2 expression and the genes that are expressed after its activation by playing singing mice recording of songs from their own species and neighboring species and observing the gene expression patterns.

"We found that when an animal hears a song from the same species, these neurons that carry FOXP2 become activated. So we think that FOXP2 may play a role in integrating that information," said Lauren O'Connell, a post-doctoral researcher in the Phelps lab.

Learning what activates FOXP2 and what genes are activated by it could provide clues into how outside stimuli affects gene expression and what genes are important in the understanding and integration of information, said Phelps.

"We ask two things, whether there are sequence changes in the DNA that are associated with the elaboration of the song and whether particular elements seem to be interacting with FOXP2 more," said Phelps. "That gives us leads into what role FOXP2 might play into the elaboration of vocalization."

Big Data Mining

Phelps' uses next-generation sequencing to decipher how FOXP2 interacts with DNA to regulate the function of other genes. The process involves reading tiny fragments of overlapping DNA so that the entire sequence can be deduced. It is a procedure that generates massive amount of data that only the processing power of a supercomputer can handle, said O'Connell.

"You need TACC to do it," said O'Connell, referring to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which houses the supercomputers the lab uses. "The more data you have, the more memory it requires, so a lot of the data we can only process on Lonestar's high memory nodes."

Lonestar and Ranger are the names of the two supercomputers that the Phelps lab uses to crunch their data, with Ranger running programs in two hours that used to take the lab three days to run on their desktop. Both computers are among the top 100 supercomputers in the world.

Future Applications

At the most basic level, Phelps' research is asking questions about the biology and behavior of an exotic rodent. But finding out more about the link between FOXP2 and the song of the signing mouse could bring a better understanding into how the gene may contribute to language deficits in people, especially those with autism, said Phelps.

"When people do genome wide association studies in humans the genetic variation tends to occur in huge blocks. So if you get some DNA sequence that predicts a phenotype, like risk for autism, it's very hard to know what aspect in this very long stretch of DNA is actually important for that," said Phelps.

By identifying the sequences of DNA that interact with FOXP2 and other associated genes that are most vital to gene function, researchers in the future might be able to narrow down the "huge blocks" where a possible causal sequence is located into smaller pieces. In other words, reducing the size of the metaphorical haystack to a size where finding the needle is a much simpler task.

While a singing mouse may seem like a strange place to look to study the impact of genetics on language, O'Connell says that the advent of gene sequencing technology is allowing a whole menagerie of animals to be used for research that could later be applied to humans.

"I use TACC to sequence a lot of different animals: birds and fish and frogs and mammals and beetles," said O'Connell, mentioning the other organisms she studies outside of the Phelps lab. "Each of these model systems has something unique to contribute that teaches us about biology that is still applicable to humans."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center. The original article was written by Monica Kortsha.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

"The Impact of Oral Health on the Academic Performance of Disadvantaged Children," appearing in the September 2012 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, examined nearly 1500 socioeconomically disadvantaged elementary and high school children in the Los Angeles Unified School District, matching their oral health status to their academic achievement and attendance records.

Ostrow researchers had previously documented that 73 percent of disadvantaged kids in Los Angeles have dental caries, the disease responsible for cavities in teeth. The new study shines light on the specific connection between oral health and performance in school for this population, said Roseann Mulligan, chair of the school's Division of Dental Public Health and Pediatric Dentistry and corresponding author of the study.

Children who reported having recent tooth pain were four times more likely to have a low grade point average — below the median GPA of 2.8 — when compared to children without oral pain, according to study results.

Poor oral health doesn't just appear to be connected to lower grades, Mulligan said, adding that dental problems also seem to cause more absences from school for kids and more missed work for parents.

"On average, elementary children missed a total of 6 days per year, and high school children missed 2.6 days. For elementary students, 2.1 days of missed school were due to dental problems, and high school students missed 2.3 days due to dental issues," she said. "That shows oral health problems are a very significant factor in school absences. Also, parents missed an average of 2.5 days of work per year to care for children with dental problems."

A factor in whether children miss school due to dental health issues was the accessibility of dental care. Eleven percent of children who had limited access to dental care — whether due to lack of insurance, lack of transportation, or other barriers — missed school due to their poor oral health, as opposed to only four percent of children who had easier access to dental care.

"Our data indicates that for disadvantaged children there is an impact on students' academic performance due to dental problems. We recommend that oral health programs must be more integrated into other health, educational and social programs, especially those that are school-based," Mulligan said. "Furthermore, widespread population studies are needed to demonstrate the enormous personal, societal and financial burdens that this epidemic of oral disease is causing on a national level. "

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Journal Reference:

1. Lucy G. Cheke, Elsa Loissel, Nicola S. Clayton. How Do Children Solve Aesop's Fable? PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (7): e40574 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040574