The holidays are full of family gatherings. For some parents and children, this may prompt anxiety and stress. Parents may feel others might judge them for their parenting styles or put them under pressure to act a certain way. These feelings can contribute to unnecessary added stress. 

It’s important to set boundaries and decide what is important to you as a parent. Having input from other parents can be helpful but isn’t necessary. Parents should communicate ahead of time on issues that might be critical or controversial. Most importantly, it’s crucial to remember that babies and young children are unpredictable. Planning for new situations can help alleviate some stress during the holiday season.

Read the full article here.

Emma Dineen

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Good afternoon and welcome to Trivia Tuesday!

This week’s question is: when does hand-eye coordination start to develop?

1. 3 months
2. 10 months
3. 2 years
4. 1 1/2 years

 

The last question we asked before break was: “Effortful control is the ability to control one’s actions. When does this typically develop in childhood?” The correct answer is… around 2 ½ to 3 years old! This is associated with behavioral skills, social skills, and even later through academic achievement.

 

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

Part of a child’s development involves the acquisition of empathy, an important trait to have for engaging with others in job settings, school environments and with family. Empathy, or the ability to “walk in another person’s shoes” is thought to appear in children at around age four or five. Not all children, however, easily obtain this trait. Autistic children struggle to display empathetic characteristics partially due to lower levels of mirror neuron activation of emotion areas in the brain.

Researchers analyzed this situation and considered ways to help autistic children become more empathetic through a video game. The game involves an avatar that displays basic human needs and the settings in which they take place. Children would then have to act as a caregiver to the avatar and be responsible for fulfilling their needs. For example, the child would bring the avatar to the kitchen when hungry for a meal. It was found that participation in the game made children further understand the avatars’ needs and the responses they took to those needs.

 

Read the full article here!

 

Nolyette Verastegui

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

 

Some of our best memories as children originate from playing. However, as time goes on, children could be playing less, which could be negatively impacting their mental health. Current researchers are claiming that increases in children’s mental health issues could be at least partially due to a decrease in independent playtime.

While there are other factors that could be contributing to the increase in poor mental health in children, playtime allows children to use their imagination and express themselves. Children with less independent playtime have less time to explore different aspects of the world and who they are.

Read the full article here.

Emma Dineen

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

This article focuses on the language development of Spanish-learning infants who are part of low socioeconomic status families and the parental influences that play a role in this acquisition. Researchers were trying to understand if earlier experience with language was linked to language efficiency processing in infants. Also, a key question was if this early language experience influences later vocabulary knowledge. 

Researchers observed speech accessible to 19 month old infants through audio recording technology. Audio recordings observed child-directed speech as well as overheard speech from the parents. Results showed that the total amount of adult speech recorded varied significantly, with one of the lowest word counts being fewer than 2,000 and the highest almost 29,000. It was also found that children who experienced more child-directed speech earlier at 19 months had larder vocabularies at 24 months. The article gives helpful insight into what sorts of outcomes we see when adults interact verbally with their children and how they contribute to their child’s language acquisition.

Read the full article here!

 

Nolyette Verastegui

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Sign language is something that is commonly used around the world to connect deaf individuals with individuals who can hear. Sadly, in Nicaragua, there was not always deaf education provided to help teach young children sign language. However, this did not stop the children there from learning how to communicate with the people around them.

Ann Senghas talks on this episode of Radiolabs about how these children developed a language to break the barriers they had once experienced. She evaluated the language they used for over 30 years, and even within this time, was able to witness how much the language changed. Language is something that is so important for development, and it is so impactful to witness how language can come to be even in adverse situations.

To listen to more click here!

Mikayla Clemens

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Picture this: You are a child receiving a cookie from your parents. Your sibling also receives the sweet treat but cut in half. You become frustrated because you believe that they were given two cookies while you were given a single one, when really, that is not the case. This phenomenon is called conservation, established by psychologist Jean Piaget. 

According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the preoperational stage of development in children involves cognition errors. Children between the ages of four and seven are said to make conservation errors, not being able to understand that altering a substance’s appearance (like cutting the cookie in half) does not change its basic properties (it being a single cookie). Instead, children in this stage of development focus on centration; focusing their attention on a single characteristic of a situation (the amount of cookies seen) and disregarding others (the cookie being cut in half).

Importantly, children’s developmental milestones differ greatly, and not every child will go through these developmental stages as is stated. However, Piaget’s discovery of the preoperational stage serves as a basis for common logical mistakes made by children aged four to seven.

Read the full article here!

 

Nolyette Verastegui

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

How do we go from running around in diapers freely as infants to dressing appropriately for work as adults? In this TED Talk, Sara Valencia addresses when in development we become sensitive to others evaluations. To investigate this question, Valencia and her team designed a game called “The Robot Task”, which revealed how children modify their behaviors when others are watching. Two toys were presented to the children; one associated with a positive cue from the experimenter and the other with a negative one. The children were then given the freedom to play with the toy while being watched by the experimenter or while the experimenter was turned around. It was thought that if children are sensitive to others evaluations, both of the factors previously mentioned would influence their play. Researchers found that this ability surprisingly develops very early in development.

Watch the full Ted Talk here!

 

Nolyette Verastegui

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

 

As addressed in previous posts, providing children time to go outside and play reaps benefits across multiple domains of a child’s development. It promotes gross motor development, allows kids to use their imagination and creative thinking skills while tackling social development milestones… the list is endless. However, when thinking from an educational standpoint, this idea of an outdoor classroom is not something that is new and has been seen 40,000 years ago!

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19’s sudden switch to online learning, a lot of classrooms have spent less time outside. This has created questions in the benefits of integrating nature into classrooms and whether this new style of education is beneficial or harmful to students. Today’s article brings to light the history behind outdoor classrooms; where we first saw examples of them, how they have changed, and what they look like now post pandemic.

To read more, click here!

Mikayla Clemens

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS