My Geek Baby

I am often amazed watching my sister raise her kids One of the things I observed was how the children, even before they could speak in full sentences, could understand what is being said to them and what is going on around them. Watch a parent gently remind a child of appropriate behavior by whispering in her ear is one way to see the wheels turning. There’s no discussion. The child just knows.

Children, age six to 10 months are super smart, and a recent study suggests that they can make social judgments about the actions of people around them, by simply observing.

“Infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual,” the Yale University psychology researchers report in most recent edition of Nature.

I recently praised the fabulousity of Google Analytics and I’m still having fun tracking readership.

Top five countries reading MBG:
1. United States
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. Australia
5. France

Because I’m located minutes outside of Washington, DC, in Virginia, it is no surprise that most of the domestic readers also hale from this state too.

Top five states reading MGB
1. Virginia
2. California
3. New York
4. Texas
5. Florida

How are people finding us? Keyword searches on
1. baby geek
2. geek baby names
3. geek baby
4. geek babies
5. geek baby toys

Funniest/strangest keyword searches
1. hello my ragtime gal frog wav
2. magnolia sukey love (a name search?)
3. preggo panties
4. roller derby

A recent study shows that babies who are breast-fed have fewer cardiovascular disease later in life. Measures of body mass index (BMI) and a higher average HDL (high-density lipoprotein or “good” cholesterol) were measured in adulthood. Although I have to wonder how the scientists attribute this specifically to nursing, when there are a whole host of factors that go into BMI and HDL levels. So, I kept reading and learned that adjustments were made for influencing factors such as the use of blood pressure-lowering medication, maternal education, maternal smoking, and maternal BMI. Huh. Interesting.

Another unrelated study shows that babies who are breast-fed tend of have higher IQs than their bottle-fed counterparts (darn, I was a formula baby!), according to Yale researcher and collaborators who reported results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The caveat? The IQ benefits are only for kiddos with the genetic variant in FADS2, a gene involved in the control of fatty acid pathways. According to the press release, “The study included 1,037 children in New Zealand and 1,116 families with same sex twins in England and Wales. Those who were breastfed and had the genetic variant FADS2 had IQs that were 5.6 to 6.3 points higher than children who were breastfed but did not have the variant.”

So where does that leave the breast vs. bottle fence-sitters? Do what you feel is best. There’s no magic bullet for ensuring your kids are smart and healthy! Also you can’t base life decisions on one or two studies. But it is interesting to learn how complex the human body is.

I love Google Analytics. Since we started tracking traffic and users for less than a month now, it’s been very cool to see general statistics about readers (not like computer passwords, people!) and where they are from.

U.S.-based readers take the biggest slice of the pie but we also have readers in:

United Kingdom
Canada
Italy
Germany
Netherlands
Costa Rica
Australia
Antigua
Brazil
Israel
Hong Kong
Romania
Philippines
Serbia
Chile
Mexico
United Arab Emirates

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, an arm of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded $30 million to four research centers to study what some call the “fourth grade slump” where a split divides students who excel at reading with those who struggle. The term–attributed to the late Jeanne S. Chall, a professor and educational psychologist at Harvard University’s graduate school of education–is used to describe the grade where reading goes beyond basic decoding into more fluency of texts and comprehension of the written word, according to a recent article on edweek.org.

Solving reading difficulties early is critical to help struggling students catch up to their classmates, but unfortunately many never do. Research centers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Florida State University, University of Houston, and the Baltimore-based Kennedy Krieger Institute, will participate in the studies of children with learning disabilities and reading comprehension issues. Although each center will have a unique look at the issues, all intend to develop solutions that can be used in the classroom setting.

University of Colorado at Boulder
Researchers to ID and characterize reading disabilities and ADHD. A twin and sibling study will follow students from elementary school through high school, looking at the role of genetics and the environment.

Florida State University
Researchers to compare approaches for defining, classifying, and preventing learning disabilities affecting decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, and written composition. They will also analyze the response-to-intervention (RTI) approach.

Kennedy Krieger Institute
Researchers to study the neurobiology and behavior of children with reading disabilities, and the effect of disabilities such as ADHD on reading.

University of Houston
Researchers to develop interventions to prevent learning disabilities in young studenets and to remediate such disabilities in older students, while investigating the neurobiology of learning disabilities and how the brain’s response changes with intervention.

SOURCE: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has used MRI scans to study the brain development of children in the United States, age six to 18, to investigate behaviors and learning. Differences in girls and boys’ brains and children from different socioeconomic backgrounds were studied.

From the study:
“Children from low income families performed somewhat more poorly on IQ and achievement tests and displayed more behavioral problems compared to children from middle and higher income families. They did not differ, however, on many other measures of basic cognitive functions, like memory and verbal fluency, or on most measures of social adjustment.”

“There were hints of much-cited differences in verbal and spatial ability between boys and girls, but these differences were not as sharp as those described in previous reports. In fact, there were no sex differences in verbal fluency. There were also no differences in calculation ability, suggesting that boys and girls have an equal aptitude for math.”

A Science Daily article reported about a study that suggests children who are conceived between June and July may not test as well on an achievement test as their winter, spring and fall-conceived counterparts. The cause? Pesticides used to control pests and weeds on lawns, farms and in homes affecting the early brain development in utero. Neonatologist Paul Winchester, MD, Indiana University School of Medicine professor of clinical pediatrics lead the study of 1,667,391 Indiana students and presented his results in May at a Pediatrics event.

This is the first I have heard of this premise and it is an interesting one. So, have urban parents, for whom greenspace is at a minimum, dodged a bullet? What about other states in others parts of the country?