October 28, 2025
The answer to last week’s question: About how many hours do newborns sleep per day?
Is 16-17 hours!
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This week’s trivia question is:
At what age do autobiographical memories become reliably accurate?
Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!
October 27, 2025
Race is such a diverse construct, and it is so interesting to think about how children understand, or don’t understand, race. Often times we tend to think of race and the concepts of different races as an innate knowledge that we are simply born with the ability to identify. This article dives into the idea that children’s socialization in accordance with race is a conceptual idea that children develop due to what they see, hear, and are told, and it is not an innate understanding. The article explains that in multiple experiments the idea of race is different than common sense or naive biology.
This article indirectly emphasizes the importance of adult interactions in children’s understanding of the world around them. Children are not born with all the knowledge in the world, but they are born with a brain ready to learn and absorb loads of information. This is why it is so important to guide children and help them understand prejudice and social concepts in order for them to gather information to form opinions on the ideals that surround them. This article is very interesting and dives into the ideas of race theory in children and does a good job of showing, through experiments, how this is developed rather than innate.
If you want to read more, click here!
Jenna Coplon
UConn KIDS Research Assistant
October 23, 2025
In her TED Talk, Austėja Landsbergienė encourages parents and caregivers to focus less on perfection and more on meaningful connection. She explains that modern parenting often revolves around high expectations–wanting children to achieve, behave, and succeed according to adult standards. However, these expectations can create unnecessary stress for both parents and children, causing kids to feel pressured rather than supported.
Landsbergienė suggests that what children truly need are positive memories, like moments of kindness, presence, and genuine attention. Instead of worrying about how well a child performs, she urges parents to think about how their children will remember them years later. By being patient, playful, and emotionally available, adults can create a nurturing environment that builds confidence and emotional health. Her message is simple yet powerful: children grow best not under pressure, but through love, connection, and shared experiences.
October 22, 2025
In this article, by Mayumi Adachi, there is a lot of emphasis on how to socialize children to music and what our largest role in this is. Adachi set up an observational study in a preschool classroom to demonstrate children’s involvement in music. We know that in preschoolers, child led play is very important as they are learning to demonstrate independence and find their own being in this new world, but Adachi found that within music, it is helpful to have some form of formal instruction. With children having instructions with music, they are able to develop their cognitive skills by beginning to understand what music is about. They can start to pick up on melody and patterns that they can hear rather than just understanding patterns that they see. Music is a way to connect adults and children because melody and tune are universal characteristics that we can observe regardless of age and understanding. By teaching children about these factors and truly facilitating an understanding of music, we can form a new bond and help create a new level of understanding within a young child and their environment.
Adachi, in their conclusion, proposes other questions to continue this study and find differences within the findings. They ask how cultural influences would affect this study, how parents’ temperament and sensitivities to new things could influence the findings, and if where the study has taken place would change the findings? Overall, Adachi touches on the impact of music on children’s lives and how we, as adults, can help guide them through these new findings. A great reading for people interested on the connections between music and development!
If you want to read more, click here!
Jenna Coplon
UConn KIDS Research Assistant
October 21, 2025
The answer to last week’s question: Which sense is not fully developed at birth?
Is vision!
This week’s trivia question is:
About how many hours do newborns sleep per day?
Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!
October 20, 2025
Children’s learning and cognitive development aren’t just affected by what occurs in their development; a crucial factor that is often overlooked is when it happens. The article Promoting Temporal Investigations of Development in Context dives deep into this idea, exploring how the timing, duration, and consistency of social and economic circumstances shape kids’ learning outcomes. Across 75 longitudinal studies conducted between 2000 and 2021, researchers tracked children and families from pregnancy through early adolescence, uncovering how factors like poverty, family stress, and educational opportunity influence cognitive growth over time. The takeaway? Persistent disadvantage during key developmental windows can have lasting effects on learning, while more stable or temporary contexts may decrease these risks. The overarching idea of the article is: timing is everything. This aligns with the findings of other famous studies, such as the Genie Wiley case study. Genie Wiley was lacking verbal attention for the first 12 years of her childhood, so unfortunately, she never developed the neural pathways to effectively speak. This is an extreme example, however it effectively demonstrates that obstruction or influence on fundamental phases of development can have lasting effects. What makes Promoting Temporal Investigations of Development in Context so compelling is the perspective it takes. To truly understand a child’s development, we can’t just look at where they are now; we have to trace how they got there, and not just what occurred, but when, and how that might influence development. It’s a call for psychologists, educators, and ordinary people alike to think less like photographers and more like filmmakers, to capture not just the moment, but the story unfolding across time.
To read this article, click here
Cooper Armogida
UConn KIDS Research Assistant
October 16, 2025
In this Ted Talk by fourth grader Gwen Coffey, she explains her point of view as a kid feeling “micromanaged” by adults around her. She brings up creative points about how kids are always being told no rather than being taught how to do things safely. She says she can’t run on the playground to play tag, and she feels rushed to eat her lunch and is told to be quiet. She relates to adults who feel micromanaged by their bosses, and claims that she, as an explorative kid, feels micromanaged at school, a place she believes to be about learning to become more independent. She refers to overprotective parenting and says it doesn’t seem like the worst thing ever, but it can lead to children being more anxious and less independent. Her argument is that parents, teachers, and anyone else who works with kids should teach children thoroughly and not just dismiss their curiosity because of safety.
Gwen describes how her parents have let her just be a kid. Exploring her world safely is how she has learned to be more self-sufficient. She says she can use a drill at home and has even learned how to use a blowtorch; she didn’t just discover these things, instead her parents guided her through ways to explore safely. Overall, Gwen Coffey makes simple points to imprint on adults why children need to be able to learn and make mistakes to grow into independent human beings. The idea of letting kids just be kids is a common theme throughout her Ted Talk, which is important for adults who work with or have children to keep in the forefront of their mind when helping these kids grow!
To watch this Ted Talk, click here!
Jenna Coplon
UConn KIDS Research Assistant
October 15, 2025
Have you ever wondered how babies start to make sense of all the sounds they hear? For adults, recognizing words in a continuous stream of speech comes naturally and feels effortless, as we are able to rely on our existing knowledge of word forms, grammar, and context.
This study explored how infants use familiar names, such as their own name and the name they use for their caregiver (i.e., Mommy), to help break the continuous flow of speech into separate words. Unlike adults, infants don’t yet have the skill to use top-down processing and rely on stored knowledge of word forms. Instead, they use bottom-up cues like stress, sound patterns, and rhythm to make sense of speech. Because infants only recognize a few words by around six months (like their name or their parents’ name), researchers wondered whether these familiar words could serve as anchors to help them identify new ones. Infants between 6.5 and 7 months from English-speaking homes participated in two experiments. Using a head-turn preference method, researchers played short passages for each baby. In one passage, the baby’s own name was followed by a novel word; in the other, a different name appeared before another new word. The setup tracked how long babies listened to each passage to measure recognition and interest. In both experiments, infants listened significantly longer to the words that followed their own or their mother’s name compared to unfamiliar names or control words. This means that infants could segment and remember new words only when they were paired with familiar names, which showed that even by six months, they can use known words to help make sense of speech. These results suggested that infants begin to develop top-down processing much earlier than previously thought. While adults use a broad vocabulary and grammar to decode speech, infants start with a handful of familiar words as their anchors. As their vocabulary grows through exposure, their speech processing becomes more efficient, eventually resembling the advanced top-down processing adults use every day.
To read more, click here!
Alexandra Lagaros
UConn KIDS Research Assistant
October 14, 2025
The answer to last week’s question: At what age do most children begin to use two-word sentences?
Is 2 years old!
This week’s trivia question is:
Which sense is not fully developed at birth?
Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!
October 9, 2025
In her TED Talk “How to Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children,” Lael Stone explains why emotional understanding is one of the most important skills we can teach kids. She explains that many adults were raised to believe that strong emotions—like anger, sadness, or fear—should be avoided or hidden. As a result, people often grow up without knowing how to process their feelings in healthy ways. Stone argues that emotional intelligence is just as vital as academic success because it shapes how we connect with others, handle stress, and build empathy.
Throughout the talk, Stone shares her life stories from her work with children and her own family to show how kids learn by example. When adults respond calmly and listen with empathy instead of trying to “fix” or dismiss emotions, children learn that their feelings are valid and manageable. This creates a sense of safety and trust that helps them regulate their emotions better over time. She also explains that when feelings are ignored, children often respond by either shutting down or acting out—both signs that they don’t feel understood.
Ultimately, Stone encourages parents, teachers, and caregivers to rethink how they approach children’s emotions. Rather than trying to control behavior, adults should focus on connection and compassion. When we give children the space to express their emotions and feel heard, we help them grow into confident, empathetic, and emotionally balanced individuals.