Optimizing your child’s potential — Tips from Research

It’s hard these days to go to a restaurant to not find a toddler having his/her meal without a smart device in front of them. Even though there are parents who say they don’t allow their babies any television at all (yes, they exist!), the trend is in the other direction.

We’re not making it up. A US study reported at the 2015 Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting, which surveyed 370 parents of children aged 6 months to 4 years, reported that 1 in 3 had already used a smart device before their first birthday. By their first birthday, 1 in 7 infants in the study were using a smart device for at least an hour a day. Being left to play with smart devices on their own was an experience common to the majority (70%) of the children in the study. And the data from a larger poll by Common Sense Media with 1,463 parents doesn’t really tell a different story. Along the same trends are the findings by a Childwise survey comprising 2,000 children aged 5 to 16 years that children spend more time online (on average 3 hours) than watching traditional TV.

We’re still in the process of accumulating compelling data on the long-term effects of smart devices on young children. Research suggests that children who receive more screen-time are more likely to be at risk for attention problems. But it’s not difficult to understand why one might be concerned about the impact giving infants free rein to play with a smart device. Social interactions are seen as key for children’s development whether it’s about growing their vocabulary, fostering their social skills, developing their narrative abilities, helping to structure their memory of past events, or acquiring new concepts and knowledge. As the American Academy of Pediatrics says, “a child’s brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.” So more time spent on non-age-appropriate television programmes and games on a smart device means less time developing these core skills.

Which is why the expert recommendation is no screen-time at all for those who haven’t reached their 2nd birthday, and why other experts argue that children should watch videos only when they’re in their preschool years. And why Taiwan passed a law last year which curbs parent-enabled smart device usage by children under 2 years of age.

So if not mobile devices and screen-time, what then? Here are a few other ideas to help boost the development of your little one…

1. Traditional toys are better
Remember those toys? The wooden puzzle, the shape-sorter, and wood blocks with pictures. They might seem out-dated but they could be the key to boosting your baby’s cognitive development. A recent study documented how much words parents spoke when they and their 1-year-old played with electronic toys (e.g., talking phone, talking farm, baby laptop), with traditional toys, and with picture books. The researchers found that parents spoke the most with traditional toys, followed by picture books, and finally, least with the noisy toys. The reasons for this pattern aren’t clear but it might be because noisy toys which light up are exceptionally good at keeping babies occupied so in contrast, parents talk more to help keep their babies play with the quiet toys!

2. Speak more not less
Earlier studies have long established that school-readiness at the kindergarten-age predicts later school performance and academic achievements. But a new study also shows that 2-year-olds with better oral language are also more likely to learn better and have fewer behavioural problems while at kindergarten. So it pays to foster language development from a young age.

But parents often worry that introducing two languages to their child hinders their progress. The experts on bilingual research suggest that speaking in 2 languages doesn’t confuse babies nor is a one-parent-one-language policy necessary. Put simply, more speech by parents in both or either language is always a good thing.

3. Try interactive picture-book-reading
There’s plenty of research evidence to support the idea parents can boost their toddlers’ language development by reading books with them. What’s new however is the finding that it’s what parents say when they’re reading picture books that matters. Parents appear to provide more speech sounds which are helpful to their toddlers’ spoken language development during a book-reading activity than when playing with toys or puppets. So pay attention to the sounds that your baby says and respond to them!

4. Surprise your baby!
So it’s not a coincidence that babies really enjoy playing peek-a-boo with you. Previous research has already shown that babies not only pay more attention to something which surprises them than to something which is more predictable. But a recent study shows that babies pay attention to things which surprise them in order to try and “figure something out about their world“. So, showing your baby something unexpected is likely a good way to get and keep their attention!

5. Let your hair down and have fun
It turns out that babies under 2 years can judge whether we’re joking around or not. For a silly moment, we might wear a rubber chicken on our head as a joke. Or we could be pretending to wear the chicken as a hat. How babies tell which is which depends on what we say and whether there’s disbelief on our faces (which we show when we’re joking). It might seem silly, but previous studies have established a number of benefits from being funny with your kids. A 2015 study also demonstrates that 18-month-olds were more likely to remember new information from a funny situation compared to an unfunny one.

6. Avoid distracted caregiving
Responsive caregiving is another cornerstone for healthy development during infancy. This includes responding to your baby’s smiles, cooing and other vocalisations. Earlier studies have shown that not recognising signs of distress by babies and inconsistent responses by mothers towards their babies, negatively impacts their children’s later cognitive and social skills. But recent research also suggests that distracted caregiving arising from using mobile phones (e.g., whatsap) could also affect brain development in young infants.

Autism: What have we learnt so far?

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which individuals have difficulties with social interactions and communication and a reliance for routines and/or repetitive behaviours (Read this NIH fact sheet for more information). Individuals with autism also tend to display sensory seeking behaviour and according to more recent scientific endeavours, experience high rates of gastrointestinal issues.

It’s a disorder which receives much attention in both the press and in research. But research findings, despite advancing at the pace of greyhounds chasing a bunny on the race track, don’t always accompany news stories. The public’s understanding and awareness of this disorder is still work-in-progress, even though local resources for autism has vastly improved.

Research links the use of joint attention — the ability to use gaze and gestures to share attention — to autism, but a recent study points to a more accurate red flag for autism — a social smile during joint attention. This 2014 study observes that infants at 8 months tend to look at an object of interest and then smile at the person they are interacting with, before looking back at the object of interest, during joint attention. In contrast, infants at risk for autism tend not to direct the social smile at the other person in between looking at object and at the other person.

Other research has established that individuals with autism find faces aversive, and as a result have difficulties recognising the emotions of others (more about their difficulties with empathy here). In fact, a hot-off-the-press study finds that individuals with autism focus on areas of contrast and colour of real photographs and the centre of the image, whereas those who don’t have autism look almost exclusively at faces in the same photographs. And this tendency emerges at a young age: a 2014 study observes infants at 6 months to fixate on faces when someone is speaking. In contrast, infants diagnosed with autism later look away from the eyes and mouth when someone is speaking.

Recent research has also identified two other markers useful for screening autism among children aged 9 to 12 months. A 2014 study finds that babies with a head circumference that is at or higher than the 75th percentile at 9 months and infants who fail the tonic neck reflex (also known as the head tilt reflex) are at a higher risk for autism.

With slightly older children, nonverbal screening tools may be useful. A 2015 study proposes a novel way of screening for autism: It turns out that individuals with autism don’t reduce their sniffing of unpleasant smells (and conversely increase their sniffing of pleasant ones). In contrast, their peers who don’t have autism “stop” a wiffy smell in about 305 ms. Another 2015 study finds a higher proportion of children who are subsequently diagnosed with autism among families where parents voiced concerns about their child’s sensory and motor abilities from the age of 6 months, and their child’s language and social communication abilities from the age of 12 to 15 months. So although autism cannot be diagnosed till 2 years of age, there are clear indications and red flags which are proving to be effective for screening autism at a much younger age.

Screening for autism aside, there are still no clear answers to what contributes to autism. Recent research does however indicate differences in brain structure between individuals with autism and peers who don’t have autism. Apart from differences which have been observed in the brain structures which connect the two brain hemispheres to each other, a 2014 study observes a lack of neural pruning — the process by which neural connections which we don’t use are eliminated — among children with autism (for a more in-depth discussion, read this article). Genetic factors are acknowledged to contribute to autism, but environmental factors are also considered to play an important role. Increasing evidence that the composition of gut bacteria differs in individuals with autism from that of their peers who don’t have autism, has led some to suggest that gut bacteria to be a possible contributing factor to autism. While a 2015 study definitively excludes MMR vaccines as a contributing factor to autism (read more about the study here), another 2015 study speculates that other chemicals, such as solvents and pesticides, to which expectant mothers may have exposure, can adversely affect foetal development.

Despite the mixed findings about the cause of autism, more recent research does offer some promising news about effective interventions and strategies found to be useful for helping children and adolescents with autism. Just as children who don’t have autism can be trained to enhance their ability to identify emotional expressions and young preschoolers with autism can be taught social skills, recent research demonstrates that early intervention programmes play an important role in helping children with autism improve their social skills, as well as cognitive and language abilities.

One 2012 study has reported that an intensive programme comprising 20-hours-a-week one-to-one training with interpersonal exchanges over a period of 2 years, yields improved brain responses to faces among infants with autism aged 12 to 30 months. Use of this therapeutic intervention by parents has been shown to be effective on even young infants with autism. In this 2014 study, at-risk 6-month-olds, who showed signs of autism at the start of intervention (e.g., a lack of interest in social interactions and communication), had better cognitive and language skills 12 to 30 months later. In a follow-up study of these infants, further improvements were observed after 2 years of intervention. Infants’ cognitive, communication, and adaptive skills (skills for everyday living) were observed to undergo greater improvement compared to peers with autism who attended a preschool programme and who were given speech therapy.

Other groups of researchers have also shown that parent training is also an effective way to improve the quality of social interactions between parents and infants with autism. A 2014 study has shown that teaching parents to support their children’s learning during everyday activities results in better language and social communication among toddlers with autism. In another recent study, one-year-olds with autism whose parents received coaching on how to attract their infant’s attention and interest their infant in social interaction games produced better outcomes than peers receiving community-based early intervention and monitoring. A separate 2015 study has also shown that the benefits of parent training over a period of 24 weeks to include a reduction in disruptive and aggressive behaviours among children with autism aged 3 to 7 years (Supernanny also some useful tips…). It’s evident that there are various effective therapeutic options available to families of children with autism.

Interventions which reduce the severity of children’s autistic behaviours are important. But support for families are as, if not more, important. This is particularly true for caregivers and parents of children with autism, who experience a high level of caregiving stress on a daily basis and can be at risk for caregiver burn out. Journal writing has been found to help mothers manage their stress levels, while mothers are less likely to experience depression if their partners share the burden of caregiving. But it’s often easier said than done. Respite care — which provides parents and caregivers with time off to take of themselves — can play an important role for helping parents and caregivers manage their stress. And more public awareness won’t do anybody any harm either.

World Autism Awareness Day is a few months away but there’s no time like the present to support a greater public awareness of autism.

What do smartphones do for your child’s brain?

Research is clear about the benefits of face-to-face parent-child interactions over watching TV. Children have a much better chance to learn new vocabulary from human interactions than from a TV programme (here’s why), including even those which have been designed with a very young audience in mind. A new experimental study shows that parents interact less and say fewer things to their toddlers, when the TV is on in the background than when it is not. Another new study shows that having TV on in the background diverts young children’s attention away from play and learning. In this latter study, exposure to non-age-appropriate TV is associated with poorer cognitive abilities.

But time spent on TV and other media impacts not only young children’s language and cognitive abilities. Time spent on TV and gaming adversely affects the development of young children’s social skills and emotional understanding. A recent experimental study found that children’s emotional intelligence (specifically, their ability to recognize emotions) improved when they had the opportunity to interact with their peers for 5 smartphone-free days. A recent nation-wide study in the UK involving 5,000 children aged between 10 and 15 years, also reveals fewer emotional and social problems among those who spend less than an hour a day on video games.

Research about the psychological impact of children’s access to smart phones is still playing catch-up, but findings from a 2014 study involving 3,604 children links longer use of electronic media to poorer mental well-being among children as young as 2 to 6 years of age. In this study, young children’ emotional problems increase with each additional hour they spend watching TV and/or playing electronic games.

In short, it’s important to provide your children with opportunities to learn through social interactions and face-to-face conversations. Looking for some alternatives to electronic media and TV programming? Here are some ways to boost your child’s learning:

1. Read to your kids
“The number of words a child hears in early life will determine their academic success and IQ in later life”. This fact is the one reason why boosting your child’s early spoken language skills and capacity for understanding speech is so important.

A host of studies find that reading to young children promotes their language, reading, thinking, motor, emotional and social skills (here’s the science explained). The tendency for mums to read and talk to their babies while breastfeeding them, may also be the reason why breastfed children score well on IQ tests and at school.

A new study shows that reading to children as early as 9 months of age boosts school readiness in terms of their maths and reading skills.

2. Choose picture books with a story
Reading benefits children’s language in the long-term, when parents read picture books with a story rather than flashcard-type picture books. A 2014 study shows that toddlers could learn sophisticated animal facts when parents read to them from a book where animals were part of a story.

3. Engage in conversations with your baby
Babies often sound like they’re just making gurgly sounds when they haven’t learnt to say words which we use. But a new study shows that if mothers vocally respond to their baby’s babbling as if having a conversation with their baby, infants are more likely to develop language earlier.

4. Napping is good for the young ones too
A 2014 study shows that infants and preschoolers are better at retaining newly learnt information after they nap. Here’s a bit more evidence for the importance of sleep.

5. Feed your baby’s brain with frequent snacks
A 2013 local study found that toddlers whose parents spent more time reading to their children and who had snacks in addition to their main meals, to have relatively larger vocabularies. A 2007 study finds that breakfast foods which provide a steady supply of glucose to the brain (which, not surprising consumes far more energy among young children than adults), such as oats, helps children maintain their attention in class.

Things to do in the June holidays

We’re a tuition nation. It’s no secret. We know the truth — in order to succeed in life, we need tuition. We’re not Finland after all.

It can’t be, of course, that life lessons need to be learnt through failure (don’t believe what you read in this article or this Harvard Business Review blog entry). That our ability to stand knocks and all the falling down we’re going to do later in life, is partly determined by our exposure to failure earlier in life. That resilience comes from experiencing difficulties. That the road to resilience is paved with stones and potholes left there to trip us up (and hopefully help us get up again).

Certainly not. Which is why this school holiday, it’s important for our children to get their pocket money worth of tuition and enrichment classes. And definitely not spend their holiday time going to any of the following places. Although there’s no doubt that there’s no good learning to be had here (never mind what you’re told at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content, 30 May to 4 June 2014):

1. Social emotional learning lessons can be sourced pretty much (surprisingly) everywhere, from the dinner table to the shopping mall. Interactions with family members should provide invaluable lessons on social skills and interpersonal interactions. But ambitious parents may want to aim higher by taking their brood to the cinema for the likes of Rio 2, Muppets – Most Wanted and Frozen. Domesticated types can stay home with the DVD version of Croods, Shrek 3, Toy Story 3, and Despicable Me 2 (for a lesson plan, look here).

2. Lessons on business management come at a fairly reasonable fee. Young (social or otherwise) entrepreneurs can aim to clear up their wardrobe clutter in favour of accumulating wealth at local flea markets such as For Flea Sake and Zouk Flea & Easy. Creative sorts can hawk their wares at more creative arenas like Maad and Public Garden (see also Handmade Movement SG).

3. A holistic approach to language enrichment through interactive games, plays, movie screenings for children and their families can be found at Children’s Season (2014) organised by the Museum Roundtable (including the Old Ford Factory, Reflections at Bukit Chandu, and Singapore Philatelic Museum).

4. Creative brains will delight at the Ace! Festival and SAM, through art at Sungei Buloh, and classical concerts at the Symphony Lake, Singapore Botanic Gardens.

5. The Night and River Safari at the Singapore Zoo, the Jurong Bird Park, the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Gardens by the Bay, Hort Park, the butterfly park at Alexandra Hospital, and the butterfly and cactus garden at Changi Airport all offer enrichment programmes for a solid introduction to biology.

6. The Kranji Countryside Association (including Bollywood Veggies) offers geography enrichment classes, providing children with the opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge and insight into the eco-tourism industry.

7. The Singapore Science Centre offers further biology enrichment classes on Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) an explorer who conducted field expeditions in the Malay Archipelago. And no lesson will be complete without the uphill task of following the Wallace trail at Dairy Farm, Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.

8. The Singapore Science Centre also promises chemistry and physics lessons for young minds. But free cooking demonstrations at Tangs can double as basic chemistry classes.

9. Asian and local history enrichment lessons come at affordable prices at the National Museum, Asian Civilisation Museum, the Museum of Toys.

10. Useful information for children’s new hobbies (up to the ages of 85 years and older) can be found at the Library. The self-help approach to language enrichment can be attained here and here.

 

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Getting the most out of those infant years

Much focus has been given in the media to the new and wonderous abilities that have been discovered in young infants. A news feature by the Guardian not so long ago, “Newborn babies may be more developed than we think” (8 December 2013), describes a few surprising things which infants have been found capable of, while others explain how infants develop (e.g., “Infant memory works from very early“, Psyblog). Other newsworthy recent research puts the spotlight on the origins of obesity: “New research: Infant nutrition and obesity”, UCL; “A brain reward gene rewards food choices”, McGill University).

But as 2014 heralds a whole new year of opportunities to learn more (and study more) for the little ones here in Singapore, it may be useful to look backwards to find some treasures in the literature about child development. Here’s 3 ways to help your child learn:

1. Talk to your child often

Toddlers with larger vocabularies tend to have higher verbal and nonverbal cognitive abilities and better school grades, and more advanced preschool literacy skills. Given that early vocabulary plays an important role in young children’s problem solving and language abilities, parents can play an active role in encouraging their baby in his or her journey of word learning.

2. Follow your child’s focus of attention

Studies show that toddlers tend to have larger vocabularies if their parents talk to them more. That’s common sense, you say. But it’s also been shown that toddlers learn new words more easily if their parents follow their toddler’s attention and talk about the object that their toddler is looking at or is interested in. So it’s not just talking more, but talking at the right time and about the right thing that counts.

3. Understand your infants’ signals

A 1997 study by Baumwell, Tamis-Lemonda, and Bornstein showed that infants whose mothers were better at reading and attending to their baby’s signs of distress, understood relatively more words. In fact, being insensitive not only induces stress among young infants, but is associated with toddlers being less securely attached to their main caregiver (e.g., mum). So it’s important to be sensitive about your child’s emotions.

How well do you know your baby?

Hey Baby is the warm and fuzzy national campaign which has been chugging steadily along primetime TV programming on terrestial channels while Maybe Baby? is a one-stop online portal for local parents and all things about babies.

But new parents often have other kinds of questions about their developing child. They ask things like, is it healthy for my child to watch TV? Should I let my child play with the iPad? What kind of toys are good for my child? Should I start collecting pictures books for my newborn? How can I boost his or her ability to learn? Other parents have more basic questions such as are my child’s behaviours part of normal (or typical) development?

These are questions that parents often have quite different views about. There’s no exact right amount of time of TV viewing. But there are a few places to start from, if you’re a parent in want of good information:

1. Is my baby developing normally?
The KKH Women’s and Children’s Hospital lists behaviours appropriate and expected of different ages from as young as newborns to 6-year-old preschoolers.

2. Ages and Stages
These chronological developmental milestones listed from birth to young adulthood include featured articles about the best position for babies to sleep in, how to potty-train, and strategies for healthy eating.

3. Developmental Milestones
The typical stages of development for infants to preschoolers are also described by the CDC (US).

4. Social and emotional development
PBS (US) offers facts about the social developmental milestones expected of children aged 0 months to 5 years, as well as useful tips and parenting advice.

5. Healthy TV Watching
The consensus is that very young children should be given relatively few opportunities to watch television as their opportunities for learning are best available from interactions with their caregivers. This PDF from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has further information about the effects of watching television programmes with aggressive behaviours. Mayo Clinic offers other helpful tips for healthy TV habits.

6. iPads for Babies
With smart phones in every other household, the iPad is just another toy. It’s not what it can do, but what you and your very young child can do with it. Psychology Today explains why.

7. How Reading With Your Child Helps
The US National Center for Learning Disabilities has tips about choosing the right books, while the US campaign “Reading is fundamental” offers tips on reading aloud. The Hanen Centre provides firsthand advice about the benefits of reading, while local libraries like Queenstown Library have expansive collections suitable for children of any age.

8. What Toys Are Best
The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to read the label and age-appropriate information about the toy (healthychildren.org), the National Association for the Education of Young Children provides a useful guide on the types of toys suitable for different ages (but read also this article about the important role of parents).

9. How much gaming? 
Recent research findings from a 2014 study of 3,034 Singaporean children published in the JAMA Pediatrics showed that playing games with violent themes made children more likely to say they would respond with aggression, with this effect being greater among younger (primary school) than older (secondary school) children.

Children who said they would respond with aggression were more likely to think that aggressive behaviours were acceptable responses to conflict situations and to think about responding to a hypothetical situation with aggression. The negative impact of violent gaming was found to be independent of gender, gaming hours, and an earlier history of aggression (conduct problems). All these point to the need to limit the number of hours young children play games which have violent themes.

Television for babies

Recent reports and forum letters question the promotion of an ipad baby seat (e.g., “Infant iPad seats raise concerns about screen time for babies“, Washington Post, 11 Dec 2013; “Some unanswered questions“, Straits Times, 17 Dec 2013; see Psychology Today for some answers). These highlight a growing concern about using ipad games and youtube video programming as babysitters.

Research findings are clear about the benefits of real human interactions for language development. As this TED talk demonstrates, learning from a human being is different from listening to the same words overheard from an audio-video source, such as TV (here’s the science behind it all).

Numerous studies show that precocious language development in infancy is associated with parents who speak often to their babies. In contrast, there appears to be only moderate benefits for language acquisition from watching an educational programme like Dora the explorer. In fact, TV is strongly discouraged for toddlers and infants (AAP).

It has been suggested that longterm exposure to TV programming at an early age is associated with shorter attention spans (“Limit your child’s TV time“, Straits Times, 29 Dec 2013; NY Times, 9 May 2011). But that evidence is correlational in nature. Children who have shorter attention spans tend to watch more television. It may not be the case that TV shortens their attention span. Instead, attention deficits are recognised to have other causes (The US CDC has this useful factsheet).

Social interactions are also opportunities for learning. Which is what makes play an important element for children’s learning, as this commentary in The Independent (12 Jan 2014), “Give childhood back to children: if we want our offspring to have happy, productive and moral lives, we must allow more time for play, not less” explains. And time spent watching TV is not time spent playing.

On the other hand, playing together with young children on the iPad provides similar benefits to that gained with a picture book, as others have suggested (“Parenting in the age of apps: Is that iPad help or harm?“). iPads aren’t all that bad as long as they’re not the babysitter.

Sleep is key to doing well in school

We think of being exam smart, having the right study techniques, studying for longer hours and more frequently as being the key to academic success. But one of the ways to boost school performance is rooted in doing the opposite: nothing. More exactly, sleeping.

A study on medical students in 2012 showed that those experiencing more stress and poorer sleep before exams, performed more poorly than their peers, while a 2010 meta- analysis of 17 studies found that children and teenagers who reported feeling sleepy were those with poorer academic performance. In short, inadequate sleep either from not sleeping adequate durations or having interrupted sleep can spell trouble for maintaining learning performance at school.

And sleep quality has a profound effect on our daily functioning. Studies suggest that getting adequate dream sleep (also known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep) maintains our mood, mental wellbeing and problem solving abilities. These websites offer a detailed explanation of how sleep is crucial to our cognitive functioning: NIH, Harvard Medical School, American Psychological Association (APA), WebMD, Harvard Business Review, the Guardian, Huffington Post, Mayo Clinic.

In keeping with the existing literature on the importance of sleep, as this article explains, recent studies show this to be true. Sleep research published in last year demonstrated that sleep is critical to maintain a healthy lifestyle – specifically, not having adequate sleep impacts us both physically and mentally (Science Daily, 15 Oct 2013).

A recent Swedish study found that missing just one night of sleep is associated with signs of brain tissue loss (Science Daily, 31 Dec 2013) – a conclusion shared by other researchers. A literature review published this year explains that sleep allows the the brain to strengthen neural connections (“SHY hypothesis explains that sleep is the price we pay for learning”, Science Daily, 9 Jan 2013).

In short, not having enough sleep impairs our ability to make decisions, remember things, and learn new things. And school’s about learning new things and remembering them.

Here’s a few things you can do:

1. Cultivate good sleeping habits

Discovery Health has 10 useful tips. Not every tip may be appropriate or useful to everyone but we need to start somewhere. And a dark room can help: here’s why. And here are few more ideas for boosting your sleep efficiency.

2. Read about sleeping

Try the book Why We Sleep: The Functions of Sleep in Humans and Other Mammals. You might find yourself soon extolling the virtues of sleep to other busy bees.

3. Sleep the sleep

Children will do as they see. Parents who don’t practice good sleeping habits or play an enabling role for their children to have poor sleeping habits, probably aren’t going to have children who get enough rest (to do their bestest at school)!