The answer to last week’s question, “At what age is the brain fully developed?”  

Is 20-30 years old! 

This week’s trivia question is: 

By age 3, about how many words are children able to understand?

1. 1,500
2. 8,000
3. 12,000
4. 20,000

Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question! 

Sandplay Therapy as an Emerging Intervention for Generalized Anxiety Disorder in Children

Sandplay therapy is a nonverbal, multisensory, psychodynamic treatment approach used with both children and adults. It involves sculpting a landscape in a sandbox using miniature figures and symbolic representations to model personal experiences or emotional struggles. Recent psychological research has identified sandplay therapy as a promising intervention for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

GAD affects approximately 2–6% of children worldwide. For those living with this condition, daily life is often filled with excessive worry, which can lead to physical symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, and muscle tension, as well as mental symptoms like restlessness, difficulty concentrating, and irritability. For young children still learning to navigate the world, these symptoms can create chronic stress and limit developmental growth.

Psychological research consistently supports the idea that expressing complex emotions through abstract and creative mediums—such as art, play, and writing—can help individuals externalize internal conflicts and access subconscious material. While not as widely known as journaling or traditional art therapy, sandplay therapy has deep historical roots. Originally influenced by Jungian psychology in the 1920s, this method is gaining renewed attention for its potential to induce neurobiological changes.

For example, in a 2020 case study by M. Foo et al., sandplay therapy produced measurable neurological and psychological changes. Following each session, researchers observed increased activity in the thalamus—a brain region linked to emotional regulation—along with a significant reduction in anxiety symptoms. According to the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, the participant’s anxiety levels improved from “extreme” to “normal.”

This raises an important question: To what extent could sandplay therapy transform the lives of children with GAD?

Research by C. Benjamin et al. (2014) suggests that early, successful interventions—particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—offer lasting benefits for anxiety. If sandplay therapy produces similar long-term effects, it may present a valuable alternative for children who do not respond well to traditional CBT.

To explore more about this emerging field, click here.

Cooper Armogida
UConn KIDS, Research Assistant

Jenna is a junior Allied Health Science major with minors in Human Development & Family Science and Molecular and Cell Biology! She is on a pre-med track, and plans to go to medical school and become a Pediatrician! On campus she is involved in the UConn Dance Company, HuskyTHON, and the Pre-Med Society. Additionally, she works at the child development labs with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers!

Jenna is so excited for this opportunity with UConn KIDS to be a research assistant and we are excited to have her!

Talking to young children is more important than you’d think. Talking to infants and toddlers will help promote linguistic nutrition and mental exercise that will help build the child’s brain and intelligence. Talking to young children is something beneficial for their brain development and is something families can do despite their socioeconomic status.  

 

Hearing language is the basis of oral language skills which are fundamental to intelligence. Although babies aren’t able to talk back, it’s important that they’re hearing language around them. Oral language provides children with an important tool for thought and without fluent and structured oral language, it will be difficult for children to think as they get older.  

 

Dialogue, like narrating an infant or toddler’s play, can really help oral language development. It doesn’t have to be excessive or complicated language, rather it’s better to use simple language that corresponds to things in the child’s daily life, such as toys or changing their diaper. 

 

The first thousand days of life are a period of a vast amount of learning that families should take advantage of to empower them to help, support, and nourish their children’s brain development. Babies are born ready to learn but they’ll only achieve their full potential with support from their families. 

 

If you want to read more, click here!  

Angelina Stofka 

UConn KIDS, Research Assistant 

 

It has been found that young children can use gestures before language development begins, and these gestures can also predict future language development. The majority of previous studies that focused on gestures in young children have only observed them in neurotypical children; however, there is an increasing amount of work that also examines children who have been diagnosed with autism. One of the criteria necessary for an autism diagnosis is impairment in nonverbal communication, and it affects about 1 in 54 children in the United States. Since gestures have been proven to help aid in early identification and interventions for children who are more likely to experience language difficulties, this article looked to compare findings from both neurotypical and autistic children.

Neurotypical children are able to communicate with gestures before they are able to use spoken language. Their first gestures usually include showing or pointing, and the objects that they point to are more likely to be added to their spoken vocabulary. These gestures emerge around 10 months and by 14 months, pointing specifically at different objects actually predicts their language outcomes. Specifically, index-finger pointing and declarative pointing have been more strongly tied to vocabulary growth than whole-hand and imperative pointing. Painting has also been shown to be connected to an increase in vocabulary, with earlier and more frequent painting serving as strong predictors. Once children can combine speech and gesture (~2 years old) and they can convey meaning beyond single words, these combinations can predict syntactic development.

Children with Autism have shown a reduced amount of gesture production from infancy all the way through adolescence with declarative gestures. The findings for gesture production in children with ASD are mixed, with some studies showing lower performance and others showing similarities. Furthermore, Infants at an elevated likelihood of ASD, especially those who have an older sibling who is diagnosed, are at higher risk for language impairments. Some infants with elevated likelihood can perform as well as or better than neurotypical children, while others, mostly those who are diagnosed later, show reduced gesture use. Children with ASD and an elevated likelihood of ASD produce similar amounts of gesture types and gesture and speech combinations, which help predict language skills as well.

New research is suggesting that the quality and type of gestures may be more important than frequency. Gestures combined with vocalizations, or those used for joint attention and social interaction, are especially predictive of later language. On the other hand, gestures for behavioral regulation are not. In other words, for infants with ASD, the types of gestures rather than just the amount play a huge role in language development.

Overall, gestures allow children to convey meanings before they can do so in speech, and these early gestures consistently precede and predict vocabulary, syntax, and narrative development.

To read more, click here!

Alexandra Lagaros

UConn KIDS Research Assistant

The answer to last week’s question, “How developed is a child’s brain by age 5?”

Is 90% !!!

This week’s trivia question is:

At what age is the brain fully developed?

A. 8 years old

B. 10 years old

C. 16 years old

D. 20-30 years old

Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!

Every parent wonders: Does the way I raise my child really shape who they become? There are 4 main parenting styles, defined by the ways parents interact with and set rules for their kids: Authoritative (parents are warm and caring, but also set clear rules and expect children to follow them), Authoritarian (parents have strict rules, demand obedience, and show less warmth), Permissive (parents are loving and kind but don’t enforce many rules or expectations), and Neglectful (parents show low warmth and don’t set many rules or monitor the child much). Each style shows how each one can affect a child’s emotions, school success, friendships, and behavior. 

The findings suggest that the “sweet spot” is being both caring and structured. Kids raised with warmth and clear rules tend to thrive the most. But it’s not that simple–culture, family resources, stress, and even technology all change how parenting styles play out in real life. What works well in one family or culture may not in another. Being too permissive might feel loving but can leave the kids struggling with self-control. In today’s world, questions about digital media and modern family life add even more layers. 

This article opens up an important conversation: not just about which style is “right,” but about how parents, communities, and societies can better support their children so they have the chance to thrive no matter their circumstances!

 

If you want to read more, click here!

Erin Mulroy

UConn KIDS, Research Assistant

Erin is a research assistant for UConn KIDS from Shelton, CT. She is a sophomore Physiology and Neurobiology major and Spanish minor. She is happy to be a part of UConn KIDS because it gives her the opportunity to become more involved with children and the various research opportunities at UConn.

After graduating, she plans on attending medical school where she will pursue pediatric neurology. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, running, painting, and spinning for the UConn Color Guard!

 

When we look at babies, the first thought that comes to mind might be how cute they are and how new they are to the world. However, one aspect we often overlook is how babies think, process information, and perceive their surroundings. Patricia Kull delves into how babies are linguistic geniuses, as they have the ability to acquire a second language extremely quickly until the age of seven. After puberty, we observe a sharper decline to the point where it completely disappears. She mentions that there is a critical period in development, where babies attempt to master the sounds in a language. The fascinating thing about babies is that they can discriminate the sounds of every language, regardless of which country it is from, which is something adults cannot do. Because adults are culture-bound listeners, they can only differentiate the sounds of their primary language, not foreign ones.

Kuhl explains further that they were able to pinpoint when babies become culture-bound listeners, as a study was conducted with babies in Tokyo and the United States, in which they listened to “ra” and “la”—sounds, which are important in English but not in Japanese. It was found that at around six to eight months, the babies were completely equivalent in ability to discriminate between these two sounds. However, only two months later, the babies in the U.S. got significantly better, and the babies in Tokyo got significantly worse. This signified that the babies were preparing for the exact language that they were going to learn in such a short span of time.

Additionally, to provide us with an understanding of how babies can perceive another language, Kuhl explains another study conducted in which they compared Taiwanese babies’ understanding of Mandarin to 6-month-old American babies (who had never heard a second language before) who were exposed to Mandarin through twelve sessions. It was found that after two months, the American babies were just as good at perceiving Mandarin as the Taiwanese babies who had been listening to Mandarin for the past 10 and a half months.

Through both of these studies, scientists were able to figure out two things: babies are listening intently to us, and they are taking statistics while doing so. They can absorb the statistics of which language they are learning, and this changes the way their brains perceive language. The way we perceive language is founded on the representations that were formed extremely early in development.

 

If you want to watch the full Ted Talk, click here!

Alexandra Lagaros

UConn KIDS Research Assistant

Welcome back to Trivia Tuesday!

This week’s question is: How developed is a child’s brain by age 5?

A. 75% developed 
B. 90% developed
C. 45% developed
D. 60% developed

Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!