Word: brained
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...skill tests at age 3 than those who watched less. But once Schmidt and her team controlled for other factors - the mother's educational status and household income - the relationship between TV-viewing and cognitive development disappeared. That means that TV-viewing alone did not appear to influence babies' brain development; a parent's education and finances mattered more. "Initially it looked like TV-viewing was associated with cognitive development," says Schmidt, "but in fact TV-viewing is an outgrowth of other characteristics of the home environment that lead to lower test scores." (Read "Are We Failing Our Geniuses...
...Thanks to marketing claims for TV shows and DVDs created for babies, many parents believe that watching educational programming will stimulate infants' brains and actually promote learning. It's a seductive line of reasoning. Certainly, exposing a baby to brain-engaging DVDs will put him on an early path to becoming, well, a baby Einstein, right? Maybe not. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television time for toddlers younger than 2, in large part because no studies have yet established that TV exposure improves babies' learning. Now a new study published in the current issue of Pediatrics confirms that...
...found that nurse home visits were associated with a nearly 50% drop in rates of substantiated child abuse or neglect in new families and that visits increased the amount of time between a mother's first and second pregnancies. Rates of hypertension, which is known to interfere with fetal brain development, were also reduced. And mothers spent less time on welfare and worked more...
...What happens early has a long-term impact, says Olds. Indeed, about 90% of a child's brain growth takes place before kindergarten, so it's critical to teach new parents what to expect as a child develops not only during pregnancy and early childhood but also as the child matures. A large part of nurse home visits are designed to teach parents how to respond to their children as they age and help them manage the extra burden of parenting with few resources. Says Olds: "Learning to understand children's motivations and abilities helps parents treat them more sensitively...
...What's more, not only can kids' behavior benefit when impulse issues are spotted early on, so can their brains. Preschool is a time when the prefrontal lobes, which are the center of executive functions - and what Pagani and others call "effortful control" - are just developing. The better the brain can be trained at this stage, the better it performs later in life. Pagani cites a 2007 study published in the journal Science that showed that simple attention-boosting training taught in kindergarten improved focus and concentration in later years. "You can introduce a cost-effective program and reap enormous...