While there is a focus on infant and toddler food, heavy metal contamination, including lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury, is relatively common across the food supply Helena Bottemiller Evich, Policito 2021 ‘Parents Erupt Over FDA Failure To Regulate Toxic Metals in Food Lead, arsenic and cadmium are commonly found in baby foods, but also in…
Education
Autism severity can change substantially during early childhood
“IQ is considered to be the strongest predictor of symptom severity for children with autism, As IQ scores increased from age 3 to age 6, symptom severity levels decreased” Waizbard-Bartov et al. (2020). UC Davis MIND Institute study Around 30 percent of young children with autism have less severe autism symptoms at age 6 than…
Patton’s Proclamation For Apraxia Day
Like most children would be, 5-year-old Patton McCarthy was excited to meet the mayor of his town who was coming to his house to honor him with a proclamation. Patton practiced over and over, “Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor.” What is remarkable are those words that would come easily to most children, took years…
Home (Schooling) With Kids Due To Coronavirus
Schools will need to iron out a lot of details. If services are missed, the U.S. Department of Education says IEP teams must consider make up or “compensatory” services. Andrew M.I. Lee, JD editor of Understood and former attorney who strives to help people understand complex legal, education, and parenting issues Lindsay Jones, JD chief executive…
Why It’s Smart School’s Out For Coronavirus
“We do not know why children under 9 do not have issues with the virus. They have very high concentrations of the virus and there’s no obvious reason they should not transmit efficiently … X-rays of children’s lungs show that they’re clearly diseased & clearly infected, but they don’t show any symptoms” Ralph Baric, Ph.D….
Eating fruit during pregnancy boosts babies’ brain development, new study confirms
” The idea that nutrition may also impact mental health and cognition has only recently started to gain traction,” Rachel Ward-Flanagan co author of study University of Alberta A follow-up to a University of Alberta study done in 2016 confirms that pregnant women who eat more fruit during pregnancy may be giving their babies’ cognitive development a…
Study: Baby and adult brains sync up during play
Have you ever played with a baby and felt a sense of connection, even though they couldn’t yet talk to you? New research suggests that you might quite literally be “on the same wavelength,” experiencing similar brain activity in the same brain regions. I just read this study and thought this would be very interesting…
Study: Toddlers using ‘screens’ more than 1 hour a day may have lower speech skills
“In addition to the MRI results, excessive screen time was significantly associated with poorer emerging literacy skills and ability to use expressive language, as well as testing lower on the ability to rapidly name objects on cognitive tests” Associations Between Screen-Based Media Use and Brain White Matter Integrity in Preschool-Aged Children John Hutton MD JAMA…
20 Inspiring Children’s Book Quotes
All of us know the book ‘All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. That wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school. Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess….
Should contingency management plans include planned aversive consequences?
Should only positive reinforcement be specified or should plans be made to use multiple contingencies that include aversive consequences? With “normal” subjects addition of a mildly aversive contingency will often neither help nor hurt. Hundert (1976) compared giving tokens, taking tokens away for failure to emit the target behaviors a mildly aversive token cost punishment…
