My Geek Baby

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 a kid, when I took the annual Spring Break road trip south from New Jersey down Interstate 95 to Sarasota, Florida, I had books and magazines to entertain me between naps, snacks and staring out the window. Sometimes my parents played tapes of old radios shows, like “The Shadow” and it could have been 1955 inside the car. Today’s kids have iPods, GameBoy, and the like and I wonder what effect, if any, it has on their learning, their creativity, their ability to simply let their minds wander? As a writer, I’m keen on details. I love old beat up road signs at gas stations that were built decades before I was born and the interesting people who run them. Eventually I had a Walkman and began to tune into my world and tune out to my parents, but I still enjoyed the view of the areas we saw once off the beaten path of the highway. Perhaps today’s kids aren’t much different with their DVD players and in-car entertainment, but I wonder if they sense of the differences between towns and states when SpongeBob beckons. Thoughts?

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?