The United States currently faces high rates of childhood obesity. According to the Center for Disease Control, rates of obesity among children are around 17%. In order to improve children’s growing bodies, a supervised exercise program was created to get young children moving around for an hour before school starts. There were findings from a study involving two dozen elementary and middle schools concluded that the exercise programs made children happier and healthier. However, the benefits of the exercise were only shown if a child was actively participating in the program. According to national exercise guidelines in the United States, it is recommended that children and adolescents engage is at least an hour of exercise on a daily basis. But, estimates showed that only 20% of children are active.

A group of mothers in Massachusetts decided they were going to start a local program that would help their children become more active. In 2009, parents came together to organize a before-school exercise program in their local grade school, so that the amount of time children spent moving around in the day could be increased. Each one hour session included a warm-up, running, and creating group games, such as tag. All of these activities were led by parent volunteers. The program became very popular and eventually gained a formal curriculum with the name Build Our Kids’ Success (BOKS). Dr. Taveras, a pediatrician who examined the program, believes that these such programs “might help to re-instill some of our children’s instinctual pleasure in motion.”

Read the New York Times article here

Read about the study here

Learn more about the Build Our Kids’ Success curriculum here

 

In light of this week’s protests from students across the country, exploring the links between civic engagement in adolescence and positive outcomes in later life feels timely. Authors Parissa Ballard, Lindsay Hoyt, and Mark Pachucki published a research study on just that in January of this year. Their study found that adolescents and young adults who were engaged in such activities as volunteering, voting, and activism, were more likely to have higher income and education attainment later in life. Additionally, voting and volunteering were associated with better mental health outcomes.

Lisa Damour, an Ohio-based psychologist and author of “Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood” wrote an article about this study for the New York Times. She notes, “Of course, correlation does not prove causation, but the study makes a case for the benefits of civic engagement. In light of the findings, Parissa Ballard, the study’s lead author… said that ‘having meaningful opportunities to volunteer or be involved in activism may change how young people think about themselves or their possibilities for the future.'”

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Read the full article in Child Development

In the 21st century it is quite common to meet someone who is bilingual, a person who can speak two languages or more. Recent studies have shown that there are a few benefits of being bilingual, especially for brain development. In public schools, it has become a trend to have two-way immersion programs. This program focuses on assimilating students into English as soon as possible. NPR Ed was able to contact different researchers from around the world to figure out the benefits of bilingual education in middle school. Some benefits of becoming bilingual at a young age are better attention, better at reading social cues, better reading skills, better school performance, and more. With more and more public schools implementing a second language in their curriculum, children who grow up in a house speaking only one language have the opportunity to learn a new language at school, which can benefit them as they continue to grow.

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Read the full study of how bilingualism affects reading here

It has proven from multiple sources that engaging in physical activity is beneficial to the human body in many ways. However, how early in life should someone begin to engage in physical activity?  Dr. Jaci Van Heest,  an associate professor at the University of Connecticut Neag School of Education, created a program for elementary school students known as Physical Activity at a Lifetime Scale. Dr. Van Heist emphasizes through her program that physical activity is an important factor in a child’s life, which is exerted through playing.  She wanted young children to play intensely and with joy. She also made a miraculous connection between playing and the brain. An elementary school student in the program described to Dr. Van Heest that he aced a test because of his improved physical activity. That was the moment when Dr. Van Heest asked to herself is there a connection between physical activity and doing well in school. Through brain scans, it showed that the neurons in the prefrontal cortex were impacted from playing. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for complex behaviors,such as planning and contributes to personality development. In other brain scans, it was proven that there is much more brain activity while someone is walking than sitting, which can be beneficial to someone’s health. Dr. Van Heest concludes by saying that physical activity is not only a great tool for improving someone’s physical  health, but also their emotional activity. Dr. Van Heest will be hosting a Q & A session through Twitter on February 15th at 1pm to 2 pm.

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As children grown into adolescents, they are stereotyped to become self-absorbed teenagers. Recent research from Brigham Young University and University of Missouri suggests the opposite may be true. Dr. Laura Padilla-Walker led a 10 year study to track the prosocial behavior of adolescents. Prosocial behavior can be thought of as voluntary acts that positively impact strangers, friends, or family. These behaviors are valuable to study because they have been linked to adolescents’ self-worth, moral identity, well-being, work ethic, and academic success. The experiment measured 500 adolescents’ initial levels of altruistic acts, and continued to do so throughout their transition into adulthood. The individuals ranked their feelings of parental warmth, friend connectedness, and empathy to comprehensively depict prosocial behavior. Results showed that selfless acts towards strangers and friends began at a younger age than towards family. Additionally,  prosocial behavior towards strangers increased across ages 12 to 17. These findings suggest that helping others out in early adolescence can lead to lasting positive outcomes in overall well-being. The benefits of prosocial behavior can be achieved at a young age by engaging in acts such as volunteering, assisting a friend, and displaying empathy. With the lack of long-term studies on this topic, getting involved in research is crucial for a fuller understanding of the positive effects of prosocial behavior.

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It seems intuitive that reading to a child will improve their literacy skills, but can engaging in math activities also impact vocabulary learning? The connections between home literacy activities, such as storybook reading, and language skills are well studied; however, relationships between cross-domain skills, such as numeracy and literacy skills, are not as understood. In a recent study at Purdue University, Human Development and Family Studies researcher, Dr. David Purpura, more closely examined home numeracy environment and child outcomes. 114 children were tested for literacy and numeracy skills in the fall and spring of their preschool year, and their parents were surveyed on how often they engaged in numeracy activities with their child. The various parent-child math exercises included counting objects, identifying written numbers, and using the terms ‘‘more” and ‘‘less.” Researchers found numeracy activities not only aided in the development of math skills, but also positively impacted vocabulary skills. This finding shows the ability of the home setting to prepare children for more formal learning in the future. The link could be due to the conversation that takes place when children are first exposed to math concepts. By incorporating more numbers and quantities in everyday interactions with children, crucial development can take place across math and literacy domains.

 

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Can an infant pick up on your level of effort while you complete a task? It turns out that 15-month-olds are not only able to recognize persistence, but their behavior can also be influenced by observing persistence. In a recent study, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology had infants watch adults either quickly complete a task, such as removing a toy from a container, or struggle to complete this task. The infants then where given a toy that seemed like it could be turned on with a button, but  was actually disabled by the researchers. The study found that the group of infants whom had previously witnessed an adult have difficulty with a task pressed the button more times in effort to turn on the toy.  Just by seeing an adult work hard, infants can emulate that same grit in their own behavior. Researcher, Julia Leonard, suggests that instead of parents being pressured to make everything look easy in front of their children, showing hard work may positively impact children. The ways in which we model perseverance around infants and children is especially significant because persistence, even over IQ, is a strong predicting factor of future academic success.

 

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A major proportion of children’s media star human-like animal characters, but is this the most effective methodology for relaying moral lessons to children? A recent study by researchers at the University of Toronto focused on reading books with human characters, and books with anthropomorphic characters to examine different effects on learning. Both categories of books taught children ages four to six about sharing with others. The researchers evaluated altruistic behaviors before and after the book was read. The study showed that children were more likely to share after reading the book featuring humans when compared to the book with animal characters. Children seem to more easily pick up on concepts that realistically mirror their own life. This study shows the significance of learning techniques in the early cognitive development of children, especially with lessons of morality.

 

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In the first months of life, infants are able to grasp relations between objects and co-occurring words. During this rich period of learning, does sleep help to strengthen object-word relationships? A recent study from researchers in Germany investigated this relationship in infants aged 6 to 8 months. They exposed infants to new object-word pairings and then measured their brain activity after the infants had taken a nap. The study found that sleep was indeed associated with semantic encoding of words in long-term memory. This was especially true during longer periods of stage 2 sleep, indicating length of a nap can play a significant role in infant learning. Researchers additionally found brain patterns known to occur in children and adults that improve memory during sleep, also occur in infants. An infant’s sleep provides the brain an opportunity to categorize and filter what they have been exposed to, enabling further development.

 

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By pinpointing predictive characteristics observed in early elementary education, educators could positively influence children’s development into adolescence and adulthood. A large-scale 2015 study from researchers at Pennsylvania State University examined connections between social competence in kindergarten, and wellness in young adulthood. They measured qualities in children known as noncognitive skills, which include: interpersonal interaction, emotional regulation, motivation, and attention. Researchers have found that these characteristics serve as predictors for success in adulthood such as well-being, education, employment, crime, substance use, and mental health. These findings can beneficially impact school programs in providing early intervention for noncognitive skills in childhood, and to ultimately have lasting effects in adulthood. The study emphasizes the significance of social-emotional functioning, a subject that UConn KIDS researchers are also investigating.

 

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